English

Cork twists and automorphisms of $3$-manifolds

Geometric Topology 2020-12-29 v4

Abstract

Here we study two interesting smooth contractible manifolds, whose boundaries have non-trivial mapping class groups. The first one is a non-Stein contractible manifold, such that every self diffeomorphism of its boundary extends inside; implying that this manifold can not be a loose cork. The second example is a Stein contractible manifold which is a cork, with an interesting cork automorphism f:WWf:\partial W \to \partial W. By \cite{am} we know that any homotopy 44-sphere is obtained gluing together two contractible Stein manifolds along their common boundaries by a diffeomorphism. We use the homotopy sphere Σ=WfW\Sigma = -W\smile_{f}W as a test case to investigate if it is S4S^4? We show that Σ\Sigma is a Gluck twisted S4S^4 twisted along a 22-knot S2S4S^{2}\hookrightarrow S^4; by using this we obtain a 33-handle free handlebody description of Σ\Sigma and then show ΣS4\Sigma \approx S^4.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.11804,
  title  = {Cork twists and automorphisms of $3$-manifolds},
  author = {Selman Akbulut},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.11804},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

14 pages, 22 figures, greatly improved version