Some examples of small irreducible exotic 4-manifolds with free abelian fundamental group

Abstract

We produce examples of pairwise non-diffeomorphic closed irreducible 4-manifolds with non-trivial free abelian fundamental group of rank less than three and small Euler characteristic. These exotic smooth structures become standard after taking a connected sum with a single copy of $S^2\times S^2$. The contributions of this paper include an explicit mechanism to computate the equivariant intersection form of 4-manifolds that are obtained via torus surgeries and a new stabilization result concerning exotic smooth structures with arbitrary fundamental group.