Free immersions and panelled web 4-manifolds

Abstract

We show that if a compact, oriented 4-manifold admits a coassociative-free immersion into the Euclidean 7-space then its Euler characteristic and signature vanish. Moreover, in the spin case the Gauss map is contractible, so that the immersed manifold is parallelizable. The proof makes use of homotopy theory in particular obstruction theory. As a further application we prove a non-existence result for some infinite families of 4-manifolds that can not be addressed previously. We give concrete examples of parallelizable 4-manifolds with complicated non-simply-connected topology.