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 . We show that if two slice knots have sufficiently different knot Floer homology, then the resulting exotic 's made using the simplest positive Casson handle are not diffeomorphic, giving us a countably infinite family of pairwise nondiffeomorphic chiral exotic 's. Our main tool is Gadgil's end Floer homology and we use this to produce families of exotic with various phenomena. As an application, we reprove a result of Bi\v{z}aca-Etnyre that , where is any closed -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