An end to end gluing construction for metrics of constant Q-curvature

Abstract

We produce many new complete, constant Q-curvature metrics on finitely punctured spheres by gluing together known examples. In our construction we truncate one end of each summand and glue the two summands together "end-to-end," where we've truncated them. We use this construction to show that the unmarked moduli space of solutions with a fixed number of punctures is topologically nontrivial provided the number of punctures is at least four.