Related papers: Cork twisting exotic Stein 4-manifolds

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…

One approach to produce a pair of homeomorphic-but-not-diffeomophic closed 4-manifolds is to find a knot which is smoothly slice in one but not the other. This approach has never been run successfully. We give the first examples of a pair…

Given a 4-manifold with a homologically trivial and locally-linear cyclic group action, we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of equivariant bundles. The conditions are derived from the twisted signature formula…

Two 4-manifolds are stably diffeomorphic if they become diffeomorphic after connected sum with S^2 x S^2's. This paper shows that two closed, orientable, homotopy equivalent, smooth 4-manifolds are stably diffeomorphic, provided a certain…

We introduce new topological quantum invariants of compact oriented 3-manifolds with boundary where the boundary is a disjoint union of two identical surfaces. The invariants are constructed via surgery on manifolds of the form $F \times I$…

We show that the classification up to homeomorphism of closed topological nonorientable 4-manifolds with fundamental group of order 2 due to Hambleton-Kreck-Teichner can be used to classify a large set of such 4-manifolds with cyclic…

We introduce a simple cut-and-paste mechanism to construct both orientable and nonorientable four-manifolds from a given initial one. This mechanism alters the fundamental group while preserving other essential topological invariants. It…

In this article, we prove a generalization of a theorem of Lisca-Matic to Stein cobordisms and develop a method for distinguishing certain Stein cobordisms using rotation numbers. Using these results along with standard techniques from…

In recent times a great amount of progress has been achieved in symplectic and contact geometry, leading to the development of powerful invariants of 3-manifolds such as Heegaard Floer homology and embedded contact homology. These…

We construct smooth manifolds with order two $\pi_1$ and even intersection forms which are irreducible, meaning they do not decompose into non-trivial connected sums. Their intersection forms being even implies that their universal covers…

In the paper \cite{wall_1}, C.T.C. Wall proved that two smooth closed simply connected 4-manifolds which are homeomorphic are in fact stably diffeomorphic. We prove a similar result which states that two smooth closed 4-manifolds satisfying…

We construct an infinite family of hyperbolic, homologically thin knots that are not quasi-alternating. To establish the latter, we argue that the branched double-cover of each knot in the family does not bound a negative definite…

In this paper, we study stable equivalence of exotically knotted surfaces in 4-manifolds, surfaces that are topologically isotopic but not smoothly isotopic. We prove that any pair of embedded surfaces in the same homology class become…

Some generalizations and variations of the Fintushel-Stern rim surgery are known to produce smoothly knotted surfaces. We show that if the fundamental groups of their complements are cyclic, then these surfaces are topologically unknotted.…

Using the knot Floer homology filtration, we define invariants associated to a knot in a three-manifold possessing non-vanishing Floer co(homology) classes. In the case of the Ozsvath-Szabo contact invariant we obtain an invariant of knots…

4-manifolds have special topological properties which can be used to get a different view on quantum mechanics. One important property (connected with exotic smoothness) is the natural appearance of 3-manifold wild embeddings (Alexanders…

Given a closed four-manifold $X$ with an indefinite intersection form, we consider smoothly embedded surfaces in $X \setminus $int$(B^4)$, with boundary a knot $K \subset S^3$. We give several methods to bound the genus of such surfaces in…

We show that every smooth closed oriented four-manifold admits a decomposition into two co- dimension zero submanifolds with common boundary. Each of these submanifolds carries a structure of a symplectic manifold with pseudo-convex…

In this paper we obtain the following results: (1) Any compact Stein surface with boundary embeds naturally into a symplectic Lefschetz fibration over the 2-sphere. (2) There exists a minimal elliptic fibration over the 2-disk, which is not…

We point out that recent constructions of inequivalent smooth structures yield a manufacturing procedure of infinite sets of pairwise smoothly non-isotopic nullhomologous 2-tori and spheres inside a myriad of 4-manifolds. The corresponding…