Stable Cohomotopy Seiberg-Witten Invariants of Connected Sums of Four-Manifolds with Positive First Betti Number

We shall prove a new non-vanishing theorem for the stable cohomotopy Seiberg-Witten invariant of connected sums of 4-manifolds with positive first Betti number. The non-vanishing theorem enables us to find many new examples of 4-manifolds with non-trivial stable cohomotopy Seiberg-Witten invariants and it also gives a partial, but strong affirmative answer to a conjecture concerning non-vanishing of the invariant. Various new applications of the non-vanishing theorem are also given. For example, we shall introduce variants $\bar{\lambda}_k$ of Perelman's $\bar{\lambda}$ invariants for real numbers $k$ and compute the values for a large class of 4-manifolds including connected sums of certain K{\"{a}}hler surfaces. The non-vanishing theorem is also used to construct the first examples of 4-manifolds with non-zero simplicial volume and satisfying the strict Gromov-Hitchin-Thorpe inequality, but admitting infinitely many distinct smooth structures for which no compatible Einstein metric exists. Moreover, we are able to prove a new result on the existence of exotic smooth structures.