Four manifolds with no smooth spines

Abstract

Let $W$ be a compact smooth $4$-manifold that deformation retract to a PL embedded closed surface. One can arrange the embedding to have at most one non-locally-flat point, and near the point the topology of the embedding is encoded in the singularity knot $K$. If $K$ is slice, then $W$ has a smooth spine, i.e., deformation retracts onto a smoothly embedded surface. Using the obstructions from the Heegaard Floer homology and the high-dimensional surgery theory, we show that $W$ has no smooth spines if $K$ is a knot with nonzero Arf invariant, a nontrivial L-space knot, the connected sum of nontrivial L-space knots, or an alternating knot of signature $<-4$. We also discuss examples where the interior of $W$ is negatively curved.