gt.geometric topology - Smooth structures on PL 4-manifolds

Very little is known about that question, the same smoothing theory gives something that I'm trying to get people to call "The Cerf-Morlet Comparison Theorem"

$$ Diff(D^n) simeq Omega^{n+1}(PL(n)/O(n)) $$

$Diff(D^n)$ is the group of diffeomorphisms of the $n$-ball where the diffeomorphisms are pointwise fixed on the boundary. Nobody knows if $Diff(D^4)$ is path-connected or not. Very little is known about the homotopy-type of $Diff(D^4)$, no seriously informative statements other than that homotopy-equivalence. I wrote up a paper where I described in detail the iterated loop-space structure and how it arrises naturally. Moreover, I described how that iterated loop-space structure relates to various natural maps. That's my main relation to to topic. The paper is called "Little cubes and long knots" and is on the arXiv. I elaborate on some of these issues in the paper "A family of embedding spaces", also on the arXiv.

There are several natural connections here, one of the big ones being that $Diff(D^n)$ has the homotopy-type of the space of round metrics on $S^n$ -- ie the subspace of the affine-space of Riemann metrics on $S^n$, the subspace is specified by the condition that "$S^n$ with this metric is isometric to the standard $S^n$."