A note on the complexity of h-cobordisms

Abstract

We show that the number of double points of smoothly immersed 2-spheres representing certain homology classes of an oriented, smooth, closed, simply-connected 4-manifold X must increase with the complexity of corresponding h-cobordisms from X to X. As an application, we give results restricting the minimal number of double points of immersed spheres in manifolds homeomorphic to rational surfaces.