English

Infinite order corks via handle diagrams

Geometric Topology 2018-01-03 v3

Abstract

The author recently proved the existence of an infinite order cork: a compact, contractible submanifold CC of a 4-manifold and an infinite order diffeomorphism ff of C\partial C such that cutting out CC and regluing it by distinct powers of ff yields pairwise nondiffeomorphic manifolds. The present paper exhibits the first handle diagrams of this phenomenon, by translating the earlier proof into this language (for each of the infinitely many corks arising in the first paper). The cork twists in these papers are twists on incompressible tori. We give conditions guaranteeing that such twists do not change the diffeomorphism type of a 4-manifold, partially answering a question from the original paper. We also show that the "δ\delta-moves" recently introduced by Akbulut are essentially equivalent to torus twists.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.04354,
  title  = {Infinite order corks via handle diagrams},
  author = {Robert E. Gompf},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.04354},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

20 pages, 19 figures. v3: Reorganized for publication, exposition slightly expanded. Examples added (after Ray and Ruberman arXiv:1608.08654) of contractible manifolds for which every boundary diffeomorphism extends even though the boundary has an incompressible torus

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:55:23.738Z