The groups of diffeomorphisms and homeomorphisms of 4-manifolds with boundary

Abstract

We give constraints on smooth families of 4-manifolds with boundary using Manolescu's Seiberg–Witten Floer stable homotopy type, provided that the fiberwise restrictions of the families to the boundaries are trivial families of 3-manifolds. As an application, we show that, for a simply-connected oriented compact smooth 4-manifold X with boundary with an assumption on the Frøyshov invariant or the Manolescu invariants α,β,γ of ∂X, the inclusion map Diff(X,∂)↪Homeo(X,∂) between the groups of diffeomorphisms and homeomorphisms which fix the boundary pointwise is not a weak homotopy equivalence. This combined with a classical result in dimension 3 implies that the inclusion map Diff(X)↪Homeo(X) is also not a weak homotopy equivalence under the same assumption on ∂X. Our constraints generalize both of constraints on smooth families of closed 4-manifolds proven by Baraglia and a Donaldson-type theorem for smooth 4-manifolds with boundary originally due to Frøyshov.