Related papers: Infinitely many small exotic Stein fillings

We show that minimal symplectic 4--manifolds with $b_2^+ >1$ and with residually finite fundamental groups are irreducible. We also give examples of irreducible orientable four--manifolds with indefinite intersection forms which are not…

We construct a new family {K_n} of simply connected symplectic 4-manifolds with the property c_1^2(K_n)/chi(K_n) -> 9 (as n goes to infinity).

In this article we present infinitely many 3-manifolds admitting infinitely many universally tight contact structures each with trivial Ozsvath-Szabo contact invariants. By known properties of these invariants the contact structures…

We prove that there exists no a priori bound on the Euler characteristic of a closed symplectic 4-manifold coming solely from the genus of a compatible Lefschetz pencil on it, nor is there a similar bound for Stein fillings of a contact…

We show examples of pairs of smooth, compact, homeomorphic 4-manifolds, whose diffeomorphism types are distinguished by the topology of the singular sets of smooth stable maps defined on them. In this distinction we rely on results from…

We present an infinite sequence of smooth embeddings of a connected sum of 6 projective planes in the 4-sphere, which are all ambient homeomorphic, but pairwise ambient non-diffeomorphic. The double covers of the 4-sphere ramified along…

We construct a holomorphically varying family of complex surfaces X_s, parametrized by the points s in any Stein manifold, such that every X_s is a long C^2 which is biholomorphic to C^2 for some but not all values of s.

We show that the group of holomorphic automorphisms of a Stein manifold X of dimension greater than 1 is infinite-dimensional, provided X is a homogeneous space of a holomorphic action of a complex Lie group.

We show that there exists an algorithm that takes as input two closed, simply connected, topological 4-manifolds and decides whether or not these 4-manifolds are homeomorphic. In particular, we explain in detail how closed, simply…

We define family versions of the invariant of 4-manifolds with contact boundary due to Kronheimer and Mrowka and use these to detect exotic diffeomorphisms of 4-manifolds with boundary. Further, we show the existence of the first example of…

We prove that every continuous map from a Stein manifold X to a complex manifold Y can be made holomorphic by a homotopic deformation of both the map and the Stein structure on X. In the absence of topological obstructions the holomorphic…

We show that two closed, connected $4$-manifolds with finite fundamental groups are $\mathbb{CP}^2$-stably homeomorphic if and only if their quadratic $2$-types are stably isomorphic and their Kirby-Siebenmann invariant agrees.

In this note, we exhibit infinite families of tight non-fillable contact manifolds supported by planar open books with vanishing Heegaard Floer contact invariants. Moreover, we also exhibit an infinite such family where the supported…

We prove that compact topological 4-manifolds can be effectively presented by a finite amount of data.

We introduce symplectic Calabi-Yau caps to obtain new obstructions to exact fillings. In particular, it implies that any exact filling of the standard unit cotangent bundle of a hyperbolic surface has vanishing first Chern class and has the…

We consider constraints on the topology of closed 3-manifolds that can arise as hypersurfaces of contact type in standard symplectic $R^4$. Using an obstruction derived from Heegaard Floer homology we prove that no Brieskorn homology sphere…

We study the relationship between exotic R^4's and Stein surfaces as it applies to smoothing theory on more general open 4-manifolds. In particular, we construct the first known examples of large exotic R^4's that embed in Stein surfaces.…

We show that on every compact Riemannian 2-orbifold there exist infinitely many closed geodesics of positive length.

We investigate two specific contractible manifolds (one Stein, and the other non-Stein) whose boundaries have non-trivial mapping class groups. In both cases we show that every diffeomorphism of their boundary extends to a diffeomorphism of…

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…