UC Berkeley

For a closed oriented smooth 4-manifold X with $b^2_+(X)>0$, the Seiberg-Witten invariants are well-defined. Taubes' "SW=Gr" theorem asserts that if X carries a symplectic form then these invariants are equal to well-defined counts of pseudoholomorphic curves, Taubes' Gromov invariants. In the absence of a symplectic form there are still nontrivial closed self-dual 2-forms which vanish along a disjoint union of circles and are symplectic elsewhere. This thesis describes well-defined counts of pseudoholomorphic curves in the complement of the zero set of such near-symplectic 2-forms, and it is shown that they recover the Seiberg-Witten invariants (modulo 2). This is an extension of Taubes' "SW=Gr" theorem to non-symplectic 4-manifolds.

The main results are the following. Given a suitable near-symplectic form w and tubular neighborhood N of its zero set, there are well-defined counts of pseudoholomorphic curves in a completion of the symplectic cobordism (X-N, w) which are asymptotic to certain Reeb orbits on the ends. They can be packaged together to form "near-symplectic" Gromov invariants as a map on the set of spin-c structures of X. They are furthermore equal to the Seiberg-Witten invariants with mod 2 coefficients, where w determines the "chamber" for defining the latter invariants when $b^2_+(X)=1$.

In the final chapter, as a non sequitur, a new proof of the Fredholm index formula for punctured pseudoholomorphic curves is sketched. This generalizes Taubes' proof of the Riemann-Roch theorem for compact Riemann surfaces.