Related papers: Infinitely many small exotic Stein fillings

In the first part of this paper, we construct infinitely many hyperbolic closed 3-manifolds which admit no symplectic fillable contact structure. All these 3-manifolds are obtained by Dehn surgeries along L-space knots or L-space…

We prove that for every natural number k there are simply connected topological four-manifolds which have at leat k distinct smooth structures supporting Einstein metrics, and also have infinitely many distinct smooth structures not…

Given a link of a normal surface singularity with its canonical contact structure, we compare the collection of its Stein fillings to its Milnor fillings (that is, Milnor fibers of possible smoothings). We prove that, unlike Stein fillings,…

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…

The boundary of every relatively compact Stein domain in a complex manifold of dimension at least two is connected. No assumptions on the boundary regularity are necessary. The same proofs hold also for $q$-complete domains, and in the…

Loi and Piergallini showed that a smooth compact, connected $4$-manifold $X$ with boundary admits a Stein structure if and only if $X$ is a simple branched cover of a $4$-disk $D^4$ branched along a positive braided surface $S$ in a bidisk…

We prove that there are infinitely many pairs of homeomorphic non-diffeomorphic smooth 4-manifolds, such that in each pair one manifold admits an Einstein metric and the other does not. We also show that there are closed 4-manifolds with…

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…

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…

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…

We prove that there are compact submanifolds of the 3-sphere whose interiors are not homeomorphic to any geometric limit of hyperbolic knot complements.

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

We note that infinitely many irreducible, closed, simply connected 4-manifolds, with prescribed signature and spin type, admit perfect Morse functions, i.e. they can be given handle decompositions without 1- and 3-handles. In particular,…

In this article, using combinatorial techniques of mapping class groups, we show that a Stein fillable integral homology $3$-sphere supported by an open book decomposition with page a $4$-holed sphere admits a unique Stein filling up to…

We show how to construct absolutely exotic smooth structures on compact 4-manifolds with boundary, including contractible manifolds. In particular, we prove that any compact smooth 4-manifold W with boundary that admits a relatively exotic…

We established existence of periodic Reeb orbits for a large class of tight contact structures on closed 3-manifolds, notably the Stein fillable structures, based on a fundamental theorem of Cliff Taubes on symplectic 4-manifolds.

In \cite{AP3, AHP}, the first author and his collaborators constructed the irreducible symplectic $4$-manifolds that are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to $(2n-1){\mathbb{CP}}^{2}\#(2n-1)\overline{\mathbb{CP}}^{2}$ for each integer $n…

We study a class of simply connected manifolds in all odd dimensions greater than 3 that exhibit an infinite number of toric contact structures of Reeb type that are inequivalent as contact structures. We compute the cohomology ring of our…

We introduce the notion of asymptotically finitely generated contact structures, which states essentially that the Symplectic Homology in a certain degree of any filling of such contact manifolds is uniformly generated by only finitely many…

We construct examples of codimension two hyperbolic link complements in closed smooth 4-manifolds with homeomorphism type $\#_{2k}S^2 \times S^2$. All our examples are based on a construction of J. Ratcliffe and S. Tschantz, who constructed…