Related papers: Cork twisting exotic Stein 4-manifolds

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 is a survey article about the connections between knot theory and four-dimensional topology. Every four-manifold can be represented in terms of a link, by a Kirby diagram. This point of view has led to progress in computing invariants…

Harer, Kas and Kirby have conjectured that every handle decomposition of the elliptic surface $E(1)_{2,3}$ requires both 1- and 3-handles. In this article, we construct a smooth 4-manifold which has the same Seiberg-Witten invariant as…

We discuss corks, and introduce new objects which we call plugs. Though plugs are fundamentally different objects, they also detect exotic smooth structures in 4-manifolds like corks. We discuss relation between corks, plugs and rational…

We construct the first examples of non-smoothable self-homeomorphisms of smooth $4$-manifolds with boundary that fix the boundary and act trivially on homology. As a corollary, we construct self-diffeomorphisms of $4$-manifolds with…

We present a pair of smooth fiber bundles over the circle with a common $4$-dimensional fiber with the following properties: (1) their total spaces are diffeomorphic to each other; (2) they are isomorphic to each other as topological fiber…

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…

We construct an invariant of open four-manifolds using the Heegaard Floer theory of Ozsvath and Szabo. We show that there is a manifold X homeomorphic to R^4 for which the invariant is non-trivial, showing that X is an exotic R^4.

We construct an example of a cork that remains exotic after taking a connected sum with $S^2 \times S^2$. Combined with a work of Akbulut-Ruberman, this implies the existence of an exotic pair of contractible 4-manifolds which remains…

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…

Under certain homological hypotheses on a compact 4-manifold, we prove exactness of the topological surgery sequence at the stably smoothable normal invariants. The main examples are the class of finite connected sums of 4-manifolds with…

This article analyzes the interplay between symplectic geometry in dimension four and the invariants for smooth four-manifolds constructed using holomorphic triangles introduced in math.SG/0110169. Specifically, we establish a non-vanishing…

We show that any topological, closed, oriented, non-spin $4$-manifold with fundamental group $\mathbb{Z}_{4k}$ and $\min(b_2^+, b_2^-)\geq 15$, has either none or infinitely many distinct smooth structures. Furthermore, we construct…

The aim of this article is to introduce and study certain topological invariants for closed, oriented three-manifolds Y. These groups are relatively Z-graded Abelian groups associated to SpinC structures over Y. Given a genus g Heegaard…

In this paper, we show that the Ozsv\'ath-Szab\'o contact invariant $c^+(\xi)\in HF^+(-Y)$ of a contact 3-manifold $(Y,\xi)$ can be calculated combinatorially if $Y$ is the boundary of a certain type of plumbing $X$, and $\xi$ is induced by…

Using Heegaard Floer homology, we construct a numerical invariant for any smooth, oriented $4$-manifold $X$ with the homology of $S^1 \times S^3$. Specifically, we show that for any smoothly embedded $3$-manifold $Y$ representing a…

The goal of this book is to characterize algebraically the closed 4-manifolds that fibre nontrivially or admit geometries in the sense of Thurston, or which are obtained by surgery on 2-knots, and to provide a reference for the topology of…

The aim of this paper is to produce infinite exotic structures on smooth closed oriented $4-$manifolds with fundamental group isomorphic to the infinite dihedral group, assuming that $b_2^+$ and $b_2^-$ are at least $12$.

Closed oriented 4-manifolds with the same geometrically 2-dimensional fundamental group (satisfying certain properties) are classified up to $s$-cobordism by their $w_2$-type, equivariant intersection form and the Kirby-Siebenmann…

We show that the pre-order defined on the category of contact manifolds by arbitrary symplectic cobordisms is considerably less rigid than its counterparts for exact or Stein cobordisms: in particular, we exhibit large new classes of…