Dissolving knot surgered 4-manifolds by classical cobordism arguments

Abstract

The purpose of this note is to show that classical cobordism arguments, which go back to the pioneering works of Mandelbaum and Moishezon, provide quick and unified proofs of any knot surgered compact simply-connected 4-manifold X_K becoming diffeomorphic to X after a single stabilization by connected summing with S^2 x S^2 or CP^2 # -CP^2, and almost complete decomposability of X_K for many almost completely decomposable X, such as the elliptic surfaces.