Related papers: Small exotic Stein manifolds

We reprove and strengthen some old difficult theorems of 4-manifolds by the aid of recently discovered modern tools, which involve contact structures on 3-manifolds, compact Stein domains, etc.

We give a bordism-theoretic characterisation of those closed almost contact (2q+1)-manifolds (with q > 2) which admit a Stein fillable contact structure. Our method is to apply Eliashberg's h-principle for Stein manifolds in the setting of…

We construct an infinite family of simply connected, pairwise nondiffeomorphic 4-manifolds, all homeomorphic to 3CP^2 blown up at 9 points.

We introduce a new invariant, the \textit{positive idempotent group}, for strongly asymptotically dynamically convex contact manifolds. This invariant can be used to distinguish different contact structures. As an application, for any…

We show that there are vast families of contact 3-manifolds each member of which admits infinitely many Stein fillings with arbitrarily big euler characteristics and arbitrarily small signatures ---which disproves a conjecture of Stipsicz…

In this article, we construct infinitley many simply connected, nonsymplectic and pairwise nondiffeomorphic 4-manifolds starting from E(n) and applying the sequence of knot surgery, ordinary blowups and rational blowdown. We also compute…

We construct exotic copies of $\mathbb{R}^4$ with nontrivial compactly supported mapping class groups of arbitrarily large rank. This follows from a modification of the construction of the diffeomorphism corks of arXiv:2407.04696 that makes…

We show that, for any $k\geq 1$, there exist non-formal compact orientable $(k-1)$-connected $n$-manifolds with $k$-th Betti number $b_k=b\geq 0$ if and only if $n\geq \max \{4k-1, 4k+3-2b\}$.

We show the minimal total Betti number of a closed almost complex manifold of dimension $2n\ge 8$ is four, thus confirming a conjecture of Sullivan except for dimension $6$. Along the way, we prove the only simply connected closed complex…

We study the possibility of realizing exotic smooth structures on punctured simply connected $4$-manifolds as leaves of a codimension one foliation on a compact manifold. In particular, we show the existence of uncountably many smooth open…

We show how to construct absolutely exotic smooth structures on compact 4-manifolds with boundary, including contractible manifolds. In particular, we prove that any compact smooth 4-manifold W with boundary that admits a relatively exotic…

In this article, we construct the first example of a simply connected minimal symplectic 4-manifold homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to 3CP^2#7CP^2b. We also construct the first exotic symplectic structure on CP^2#5CP^2b.

We show that, for each integer n, there exist infinitely many pairs of n-framed knots representing homeomorphic but non-diffeomorphic (Stein) 4-manifolds, which are the simplest possible exotic 4-manifolds regarding handlebody structures.…

We produce examples of pairwise non-diffeomorphic closed irreducible 4-manifolds with non-trivial free abelian fundamental group of rank less than three and small Euler characteristic. These exotic smooth structures become standard after…

A short survey of exotic smooth structutes on 4-manifolds is given with a special emphasis on the corresponding cork structures. Along the way we discuss some of the more recent results in this direction, obtained jointly with R.Matveyev,…

One strategy for distinguishing smooth structures on closed $4$-manifolds is to produce a knot $K$ in $S^3$ that is slice in one smooth filling $W$ of $S^3$ but not slice in some homeomorphic smooth filling $W'$. In this paper we explore…

We provide the first explicit example of a cork of $\mathbf{CP}^2 \# 8\overline{\mathbf{CP}^2}$. This result gives the current smallest second Betti number of a standard simply-connected closed $4$-manifold for which an explicit cork has…

In this note we observe that one can contact embed all contact 3-manifolds into a Stein fillable contact structure on the twisted $S^3$-bundle over $S^2$ and also into a unique overtwisted contact structure on $S^3\times S^2$. These results…

Motivated by Stipsicz and Szab\'{o}'s exotic 4-manifolds with b_2^+=3 and b_2^-=8, we construct a family of simply connected smooth 4-manifolds with b_2^+=3 and b_2^-=8. As a corollary, we conclude that the topological 4-manifold…

Every exotic pair in 4-dimension is obtained each other by twisting a {\it cork} or {\it plug} which are codimension 0 submanifolds embedded in the 4-manifolds. The twist was an involution on the boundary of the submanifold. We define cork…