English

Distinguishing exotic $\mathbb{R}^4$'s with Heegaard Floer homology

Geometric Topology 2026-01-14 v1

Abstract

Attaching a Casson handle to a slice disk complement yields a smooth 4-manifold that is homeomorphic to R4\mathbb{R}^4. We show that if two slice knots have sufficiently different knot Floer homology, then the resulting exotic R4\mathbb{R}^4's made using the simplest positive Casson handle are not diffeomorphic, giving us a countably infinite family of pairwise nondiffeomorphic chiral exotic R4\mathbb{R}^4's. Our main tool is Gadgil's end Floer homology and we use this to produce families of exotic R4\mathbb{R}^4 with various phenomena. As an application, we reprove a result of Bi\v{z}aca-Etnyre that Y×RY \times \mathbb{R}, where YY is any closed 33-manifold, has infinitely many distinct smooth structures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.08767,
  title  = {Distinguishing exotic $\mathbb{R}^4$'s with Heegaard Floer homology},
  author = {Sean Eli and Jennifer Hom and Tye Lidman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.08767},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

26 pages, 11 figures