On the geography of simply connected nonspin symplectic $4$-manifolds with nonnegative signature

In \cite{AP3, AHP}, the first author and his collaborators constructed the irreducible symplectic $4$-manifolds that are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to $(2n-1){\mathbb{C}\mathbb{P}}^2\mathrm{\#}(2n-1){\overline{\mathbb{C}\mathbb{P}}}^2$ for each integer $n\ge 25$, and the families of simply connected irreducible nonspin symplectic $4$-manifolds with positive signature that are interesting with respect to the symplectic geography problem. In this paper, we improve the main results in \cite{AP3, AHP}. In particular, we construct (i) an infinitely many irreducible symplectic and non-symplectic $4$-manifolds that are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to $(2n-1){\mathbb{C}\mathbb{P}}^2\mathrm{\#}(2n-1){\overline{\mathbb{C}\mathbb{P}}}^2$ for each integer $n \geq 12$, and (ii) the families of simply connected irreducible nonspin symplectic $4$-manifolds that have the smallest Euler characteristics among the all known simply connected $4$-manifolds with positive signature and with more than one smooth structure. Our construction uses the complex surfaces of Hirzebruch and Bauer-Catanese on Bogomolov-Miyaoka-Yau line with $c_1^2 = 9\chi_h = 45$,alongwiththeexoticsymplectic$4$-manifolds constructed in \cite{A4, AP1, ABBKP, AP2, AS}.