Related papers: A plug with infinite order and some exotic 4-manif…

A cork is a smooth, contractible, oriented, compact 4-manifold $W$ together with a self-diffeomorphism $f$ of the boundary 3-manifold that cannot extend to a self-diffeomorphism of $W$; the cork is said to be strong if $f$ cannot extend to…

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,…

We show that any finitely presented group with an index two subgroup is realized as the fundamental group of a closed smooth non-orientable four-manifold that admits an exotic smooth structure, which is obtained by performing a Gluck twist.…

We exhibit infinitely many exotic pairs of simply-connected, closed $4$-manifolds not related by any cork of the infinite family $W_n$ constructed by Akbulut and Yasui whose first member is the Akbulut cork. In particular, the Akbulut cork…

We introduce and study a class of compact 4-manifolds with boundary that we call protocorks. Any exotic pair of simply connected closed 4-manifolds is related by a protocork twist, moreover, any cork is supported by a protocork. We prove a…

We provide the first information on diffeotopy groups of exotic smoothings of R^4: For each of uncountably many smoothings, there are uncountably many isotopy classes of self-diffeomorphisms. We realize these by various explicit group…

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…

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 $12$.

We introduce a method to detect exotic surfaces without explicitly using a smooth 4-manifold invariant or an invariant of a 4-manifold-surface pair in the construction. Our main tools are two versions of families (Seiberg-Witten)…

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 po sitive integer $m$, there exist order $n$ Stein corks. The boundaries are cyclic branched covers of slice knots embedded in the boundary of corks. By applying these corks to generalized forms, we give a method…

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 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…

Ruberman in the 90's showed that the group of exotic diffeomorphisms of closed 4-manifolds can be infinitely generated. We provide various results on the question of when such infinite generation can localize to a smaller embedded…

We introduce multisections of smooth, closed 4-manifolds, which generalize trisections to decompositions with more than three pieces. This decomposition describes an arbitrary smooth, closed 4-manifold as a sequence of cut systems on a…

We give several criteria on a closed, oriented 3-manifold that will imply that it is the boundary of a (simply connected) 4-manifold that admits infinitely many distinct smooth structures. We also show that any weakly fillable contact…

In this paper, we prove that the trisection genus of the Akbulut cork is $3$ and construct infinitely many corks with trisection genus $3$. These results give the first examples of contractible $4$-manifolds whose trisection genera are…

We show that there exists an exotic pair of $4$-manifolds with boundary whose trisection genera are $4$. We also construct genus-$3$ relative trisections for an infinite family of contractible $4$-manifolds introduced by Akbulut and Kirby.

In a small simply-connected closed 4-manifold, we construct infinitely many pairs of exotic codimension-$1$ submanifolds with diffeomorphic complements that remain exotic after any number of stabilizations by $ S^2 \times S^2$. We also give…

We construct an infinite order loose cork.