Related papers: Stein 4-manifolds and corks

There is an intrinsic notion of what it means for a contact manifold to be the smooth boundary of a Stein manifold. The same concept has another more extrinsic formulation, which is often used as a convenient working hypothesis. We give a…

We study locally flat, compact, oriented surfaces in $4$-manifolds whose exteriors have infinite cyclic fundamental group. We give algebraic topological criteria for two such surfaces, with the same genus $g$, to be related by an ambient…

This paper investigates the symplectic and contact topology associated to circular spherical divisors. We classify, up to toric equivalence, all concave circular spherical divisors $ D $ that can be embedded symplectically into a closed…

We show that, for any two orientable smooth open 4-manifolds $X_0,X_1$ which are homeomorphic, their cotangent bundles $T^*X_0,T^*X_1$ are symplectomorphic with their canonical symplectic structure. In particular, for any smooth manifold…

We prove that a compact Riemann surface can be realized as a pseudo-holomorphic curve of $(\mathbb{R}^4,J)$, for some almost complex structure $J$ if and only if it is an elliptic curve. Furthermore we show that any (almost) complex…

This paper provides a topological method to construct all simply-connected, spin, smooth $6$-manifolds with torsion-free homology using simply-connected, smooth $4$-manifolds as building blocks. We explicitly determine the invariants that…

Let $X$ be a closed indefinite $4$-manifold with $b_+(X) = 3 \; ({\rm mod} \; 4)$ and with non-vanishing mod $2$ Seiberg--Witten invariants. We prove a new lower bound on the genus of a properly embedded surface in $X \setminus B^4$…

We build a non-compact, orientable, hyperbolic four-manifold of finite volume that does not admit any spin structure.

For every $k \geq 2$ and $n \geq 2$ we construct $n$ pairwise homotopically inequivalent simply-connected, closed $4k$-dimensional manifolds, all of which are stably diffeomorphic to one another. Each of these manifolds has hyperbolic…

By use of a variety of techniques (most based on constructions of quasipositive knots and links, some old and others new), many smooth 3-manifolds are realized as transverse intersections of complex surfaces in complex 3-space with strictly…

In this paper, we collect various structural results to determine when an integral homology $3$--sphere bounds an acyclic smooth $4$--manifold, and when this can be upgraded to a Stein manifold. In a different direction we study whether…

We produce infinite families of exotic actions of finite cyclic groups on simply connected smooth 4-manifolds with nontrivial Seiberg-Witten invariants.

We present the various constructions of new symplectic $4$-manifolds with non-negative signatures using the complex surfaces on the BMY line $c_1^2 = 9\chi_h$, the Cartwright-Steger surfaces, the quotients of Hirzebruch's certain…

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…

There are two main approaches to building locally flat embedded surfaces in 4-manifolds: direct methods which geometrically manipulate a given map of a surface, and more indirect methods using surgery theory. Both rely on Freedman-Quinn's…

The main result is that an s-cobordism (topological or smooth) of 4-manifolds has a product structure outside a ``core'' sub s-cobordism. These cores are arranged to have quite a bit of structure, for example they are smooth and abstractly…

For every integer $k\geq 2$, we construct infinite families of mutually nondiffeomorphic irreducible smooth structures on the topological $4$-manifolds $(2k-1)(S^2\times S^2)$ and $(2k-1)(\CP#\CPb)$, the connected sums of $2k-1$ copies of…

The topology of symplectic 4-manifolds is related to that of singular plane curves via the concept of branched covers. Thus, various classification problems concerning symplectic 4-manifolds can be reformulated as questions about singular…

An invariant of orientable 3-manifolds is defined by taking the minimum $n$ such that a given 3-manifold embeds in the connected sum of $n$ copies of $S^2 \times S^2$, and we call this $n$ the embedding number of the 3-manifold. We give…

Given a simply-connected closed 4-manifold $X$ and a smoothly embedded oriented surface $\Sigma$, various constructions based on Fintushel-Stern knot surgery have produced new surfaces in $X$ that are pairwise homeomorphic to $\Sigma$, but…