RT Journal Article T1 4-manifolds, 3-fold covering spaces and ribbons. A1 Montesinos Amilibia, José María AB It is shown that a PL, orientable 4-manifold with no 3- or 4-handles is a 3-fold irregular cover of the 4-ball, branched over a ribbon 2-manifold. The author also studies 2-fold branched cyclic covers and finds examples of surfaces in S4 whose 2-fold branched covers are again S4; this gives new examples of exotic involutions on S4 [cf. C. McA. Gordon, Proc. London Math. Soc. (3) 29 (1974), 98–110]. The conjecture that any closed, orientable 4-manifold is an irregular 4-fold branched cover of S4 is reduced to studying bordism classes of irregular 4-fold covers of S3 with covering space equal to a connected sum of copies of S1×S2. PB American Mathematical Society SN 0002-9947 YR 1978 FD 1978-11 LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/64711 UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/64711 LA eng DS Docta Complutense RD 7 abr 2025