In a previous paper we have constructed an invariant of fourdimensional manifolds with boundary in the form of an element in the stable homotopy group of the Seiberg-Witten Floer spectrum of the boundary. Here we prove that when one glues two four- manifolds along their boundaries, the Bauer-Furuta invariant of the resulting manifold is obtained by applying a natural pairing to the invariants of the pieces. As an application, we show that the connected sum of three copies of the K3 surface contains no exotic nuclei. In the process we also compute the Floer spectrum for several Seifert fibrations.

We prove the vanishing of the top Chern classes of the moduli of rank three stable vector bundles on a smooth Riemann surface. More precisely, the Chern class ci for i > 6g − 5 of the moduli spaces of rank three vector bundles of degree one and two on a genus g smooth Riemann surface all vanish. This generalizes the rank two case, conjectured by Newstead and Ramanan and proved by Gieseker.

We introduce a surgery for generalized complex manifolds whose input is a symplectic 4-manifold containing a symplectic 2-torus with trivial normal bundle and whose output is a 4-manifold endowed with a generalized complex structure exhibiting type change along a 2-torus. Performing this surgery on a K3 surface, we obtain a generalized complex structure on 3CP2#19CP2, which has vanishing Seiberg–Witten invariants and hence does not admit complex or symplectic structures.

Let U(n) be the unitary group, and u(n)¤ the dual of its Lie algebra, equipped with the Kirillov Poisson structure. In their 1983 paper, Guillemin-Sternberg introduced a densely defined Hamiltonian action of a torus of dimension (n−1)n/2 on u(n)¤, with moment map given by the Gelfand-Zeitlin coordinates. A few years later, Flaschka-Ratiu described a similar, ‘multiplicative’ GelfandZeitlin system for the Poisson Lie group U(n)¤. By the Ginzburg-Weinstein theorem, U(n)¤ is isomorphic to u(n)¤ as a Poisson manifold. Flaschka-Ratiu conjectured that one can choose the Ginzburg-Weinstein diffeomorphism in such a way that it intertwines the linear and nonlinear Gelfand-Zeitlin systems. Our main result gives a proof of this conjecture, and produces a canonical Ginzburg-Weinstein diffeomorphism.

Let M be a compact Hamiltonian T−space, with finite fixed point set MT . An equivariant class is determined by its restriction to MT , and to each fixed point p ∈ MT and generic component of the moment map, there corresponds a canonical class τp. For a special class of Hamiltonian T−spaces, the value τp,q of τp at a fixed point q can be determined through an iterated interpolation procedure, and we obtained a formula for τp,q as a sum over ascending chains from p to q. In general the number of such chains is huge, and the main result of this paper is a procedure to reduce the number of relevant chains, through a systematic degeneration of the interpolation direction. The resulting formula for τp,q resembles, via the localization formula, an integral over a space of chains, and we prove that, for complex Grassmannians, τp,q can indeed be expressed as the integral of an equivariant form over a smooth Schubert variety.