Related papers: Small exotic Stein manifolds
In this paper we study smooth structures on closed oriented 4-manifolds with fundamental group Z_2 and definite intersection form. We construct infinitely many irreducible, smooth, oriented, closed, definite four-manifolds with fundamental…
We study smooth, proper embeddings of noncompact surfaces in 4-manifolds, focusing on exotic planes and annuli, i.e., embeddings pairwise homeomorphic to the standard embeddings of R^2 and R^2-int D^2 in R^4. We encounter two uncountable…
A pair of closed, smooth $4$-manifolds $M$ and $M'$ are stably exotic if they are stably homeomorphic but not stably diffeomorphic, where stabilisation refers to connected sum with copies of $S^2 \times S^2$. Orientable stable exotica do…
We show that there exist non-formal compact oriented manifolds of dimension $n$ and with first Betti number $b_1=b\geq 0$ if and only if $n\geq 3$ and $b\geq 2$, or $n\geq (7-2b)$ and $0\leq b\leq 2$. Moreover, we present explicit examples…
We present a necessary condition for $(\ell-1)$-connected combinatorial $(2\ell +1)$-manifolds to be tight. As a corollary, we show that there is no tight combinatorial three-manifold with Betti number at most two other than the boundary of…
This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, we use symplectic homology to distinguish the contact structures on the Brieskorn manifolds $\Sigma(2l,2,2,2)$, which contact homology cannot distinguish. This answers a question from…
We consider a large family F of torus bundles over the circle, and we use recent work of Li--Mak to construct, on each Y in F, a Stein fillable contact structure C. We prove that (i) each Stein filling of (Y,C) has vanishing first Chern…
We present small triangulations of all connected sums of $\mathbb{CP}^2$ and $S^2 \times S^2$ with the standard piecewise linear structure. Our triangulations have $2\beta_2+2$ pentachora, where $\beta_2$ is the second Betti number of the…
We prove that Stein surfaces with boundary coincide up to orientation preserving diffeomorphisms with simple branched coverings of $\B^4$ whose branch set is a positive braided surface. As a consequence, we have that a smooth oriented…
We construct infinitely many Legendrian links in the standard contact $\mathbb{R}^3$ with arbitrarily many topologically distinct Lagrangian fillings. The construction is used to find links in $S^3$ that bound topologically distinct pieces…
We provide an approach to study exotic phenomena in relatively small 4-manifolds that captures many different exotic behaviors under one umbrella. These phenomena include exotic smooth structures on 4-manifolds with $b_2=1$, examples of…
We construct examples of non-formal simply connected and compact oriented manifolds of any dimension bigger or equal to 7.
In this article we construct a new family of simply connected symplectic 4-manifolds with $b_2^+ =1$ and $c_1^2 =2$ which are not diffeomorphic to rational surfaces by using rational blow-down technique. As a corollary, we conclude that a…
We study which lens spaces can bound smooth 4-manifolds with second Betti number one under various topological conditions. Specifically, we show that there are infinite families of lens spaces that bound compact, simply-connected, smooth…
We describe a construction procedure of infinite sets of $2$-links in closed simply connected 4-manifolds that are topologically isotopic, smoothly inequivalent and componentwise topologically unknotted. These 2-links are the first examples…
The exceptional holonomy groups are G2 in 7 dimensions, and Spin(7) in 8 dimensions. In a previous paper (Invent. math. 123 (1996), 507-552) the author constructed the first examples of compact 8-manifolds with holonomy Spin(7), by…
It is shown that any finite list of smooth closed simply-connected 4-manifolds homeomorphic to a given one X can be obtained by removing a single compact contractible submanifold (or cork) from X, and then regluing it by powers of a…
This paper studies existence of $n=4k (k>1)$ dimensional simply-connected closed almost complex manifold with Betti number $ b_i=0$ except $i=0, n/2, n$. We characterize all the rational cohomology rings of such manifolds and show they must…
A hypercomplex manifold is a manifold with three complex structures satisfying quaternionic relations. Such a manifold admits a unique torsion-free connection preserving the quaternionic action, called the Obata connection. A compact Kahler…
We consider simply-connected $4$-manifolds admitting Lefschetz fibrations over the $2$-sphere. We explicitly construct nonhyperelliptic and hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations of genus $4$ on simply-connected $4$-manifolds which are exotic…