On the geography of symplectic 6-manifolds

The article investigates the geography of closed, connected and simply connected, six-dimensional manifolds. It is proved that any triple of integers satisfying some necessary arithmetical restrictions occurs as the Chern triple of such a manifold. The main tools used for producing the examples are the symplectic connected sum and the symplectic blow-up. Received: 28 May 1998 / Revised version: 22 January 1999