Brendan Owens (University of Glasgow) Embeddings of rational homology 4-balls

Certain 3-dimensional lens spaces are known to smoothly bound 4-manifolds with the rational homology of a ball. These can sometimes be useful in cut-and-paste constructions of interesting (exotic) smooth 4-manifolds. To this end it is interesting to identify 4-manifolds which contain these rational balls. Khodorovskiy used Kirby calculus to exhibit embeddings of rational balls in certain linear plumbed 4-manifolds, and recently Park-Park-Shin used methods from the minimal model program in 3-dimensional complex algebraic geometry to generalise Khodorovskiy's result. The goal of this talk is to give an accessible introduction to the objects mentioned above and also to describe a much easier topological proof of Park-Park-Shin's theorem.