Related papers: Exotic Stein fillings with arbitrary fundamental g…

By using Thurston's bending construction we obtain a sequence of faithful discrete representations \rho _n of the fundamental group of a closed hyperbolic 3-manifold fibering over the circle into the isometry group Iso H^4 of the hyperbolic…

A topological space (not necessarily simply connected) is said to have finite homotopy rank-sum if the sum of the ranks of all higher homotopy groups (from the second homotopy group onward) is finite. In this article, we consider Stein…

Starting with an O(2)-principal fibration over a closed oriented surface F_g, g>=1, a 2-fold covering of the total space is said to be special when the monodromy sends the fiber SO(2) = S^1 to the nontrivial element of Z_2. Adapting D…

It is known that every compact Stein 4-manifolds can be embedded into a simply connected, minimal, closed, symplectic 4-manifold. By using this property, we discuss a new method of constructing corks. This method generates a large class of…

We provide a closed, simply connected, symplectic $6$-manifold having infinitely many codimension $2$ symplectic submanifolds. These are mutually homologous but homotopy inequivalent, and furthermore, they cannot admit complex structures.…

In [2], the first author constructed the first known examples of exotic minimal symplectic $\CP#5\CPb$ and minimal symplectic 4-manifold that is homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to $3\CP#7\CPb$. The construction in [2] uses Y. Matsumoto's…

We exhibit a family of metrizable manifolds such that any finite group appears as the fundamental group of one of them. These spaces are especially interesting as they can be easily visualized, as opposed to classical examples of spaces…

For more than two decades it has been known that any compact Stein surface (of real dimension four) admits a compatible Lefschetz fibration over a two-disk. More recently, Giroux and Pardon have generalized this result by giving a complex…

For each g > 2 and h > 1, we explicitly construct (1) fiber sum indecomposable relatively minimal genus g Lefschetz fibrations over genus h surfaces whose monodromies lie in the Torelli group, (2) fiber sum indecomposable genus g surface…

We investigate when the fundamental group of the smooth part of a K3 surface or Enriques surface with Du Val singularities, is finite. As a corollary we give an effective upper bound for the order of the fundamental group of the smooth part…

We prove that if a contact manifold $(M,\xi)$ is supported by a planar open book, then Euler characteristic and signature of any Stein filling of $(M,\xi)$ is bounded. We also prove a similar finiteness result for contact manifolds…

Let G < SL(V) be a finite group, V is finite dimensional over a field F, p=char F and S(V) is the symmetric algebra of V. We determine when the subring of G-invariants S(V)^G is a polynomial ring. As a consequence, we classify, if F is…

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…

Generalizing work of I. Baykur, K. Hayano, and N. Monden (arXiv:1903.02906), we construct infinite families of symplectic 4-dimensional manifolds, obtained as total spaces of Lefschetz pencils constructed by explicit monodromy…

We introduce the $2$-nodal spherical deformation of certain singular fibers of genus $2$ fibrations, and use such deformations to construct various examples of simply connected minimal symplectic $4$-manifolds with small topology. More…

There is an intrinsic notion of what it means for a contact manifold to be the smooth boundary of a Stein manifold. The same concept has another more extrinsic formulation, which is often used as a convenient working hypothesis. We give a…

We prove that a variety of examples of minimal complex surfaces admit exotic diffeomorphisms, providing the first known instances of exotic diffeomorphisms of irreducible 4-manifolds. We also give sufficient conditions for the boundary Dehn…

A Stein covering of a complex manifold may be used to realise its analytic cohomology in accordance with the Cech theory. If, however, the Stein covering is parameterised by a smooth manifold rather than just a discrete set, then we…

We study integral points on varieties with infinite \'etale fundamental groups. More precisely, for a number field $F$ and $X/F$ a smooth projective variety, we prove that for any geometrically Galois cover $\varphi\colon Y \to X$ of degree…

The spectrum of a finite group is the set of its elements orders. Groups are said to be isospectral if their spectra coincide. For every finite simple exceptional group $L=E_7(q)$, we prove that each finite group isospectral to $L$ is…