Scalar Curvature and Product Manifolds

We display 4-dimensional counter-examples to a restricted form of Rosenberg’s S^1-Stability Conjecture recently proposed by Jie Xu. Namely, we show that there are smooth compact 4-manifolds M with Euler characteristic zero that do not admit positive-scalar-curvature Riemannian metrics, but for which the corresponding Cartesian products M x S^1 nevertheless do admit such metrics.