Related papers: Partial twists and exotic Stein fillings

We obtain new invariants of topological link concordance and homology cobordism of 3-manifolds from Hirzebruch-type intersection form defects of towers of iterated p-covers. Our invariants can extract geometric information from an arbitrary…

We give a simple general method of construction of affine varieties with infinitely many exotic models. In particular we show that for every d>1 there exists a Stein manifold of dimension d which has uncountably many different structures of…

Consider cotangent bundles of exotic spheres, with their canonical symplectic structure. They admit automorphisms which preserve the part at infinity of one fibre, and which are analogous to the square of a Dehn twist. Pursuing that…

We make some elementary observations concerning subcritically Stein fillable contact structures on 5-manifolds. Specifically, we determine the diffeomorphism type of such contact manifolds in the case the fundamental group is finite cyclic,…

We show that there exist infinitely many closed contact 3-manifolds containing half Giroux torsion along a separating torus whose contact invariants do not vanish. This provides counterexamples to Ghiggini's conjecture and suggests that…

We extend a construction of Stipsicz-Szab\'{o} of infinitely many irreducible exotic smooth structures of some closed four-manifolds with even $b_2^+$ and fundamental group $\mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z}$. We use the double node surgery and…

In this article we give a sharp upper bound on the possible values of the Euler characteristic for a minimal symplectic filling of a tight contact structure on a lens space. This estimate is obtained by looking at the topology of the spaces…

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 produce examples of pairwise non-diffeomorphic closed irreducible 4-manifolds with non-trivial free abelian fundamental group of rank less than three and small Euler characteristic. These exotic smooth structures become standard after…

We continue our study of contact structures on manifolds of dimension at least five using complex surgery theory. We show that in each dimension 2q+1 > 3 there are 'maximal' almost contact manifolds to which there is a Stein cobordism from…

We prove, for a class of contact manifolds, that the universal cover of the group of contact diffeomorphisms carries a natural partial order. It leads to a new viewpoint on geometry and dynamics of contactomorphisms. It gives rise to…

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

In this paper, we study strong symplectic fillability and Stein fillability of some tight contact structures on negative parabolic and negative hyperbolic torus bundles over the circle. For the universally tight contact structure with…

We prove several results on weak symplectic fillings of contact 3-manifolds, including: (1) Every weak filling of any planar contact manifold can be deformed to a blow up of a Stein filling. (2) Contact manifolds that have fully separating…

We explicitly construct a genus-$3$ Lefschetz fibration over $\mathbb{S}^{2}$ whose total space is $\mathbb{T}^{2}\times \mathbb{S}^{2}\# 6\overline{\mathbb{C} P^{2}}$ using the monodromy of Matsumoto's genus-$2$ Lefschetz fibration. We…

We adapt the Ozsv\'ath-Szab\'o full path algorithm to every star-shaped graph and establish a correspondence between negative-twisting tight contact structures on any Seifert fibred space over $S^2$, and its Heegaard Floer homology groups…

We construct a simple topological invariant of certain 3-manifolds, including quotients of the 3-sphere by finite groups, based on the fact that the tangent bundle of an orientable 3-manifold is trivialisable. This invariant is strong…

We define symplectic fractional twists, which generalize Dehn twists, and use these in open books to investigate contact structures. The resulting contact structures are invariant under a circle action, and share several similarities with…

The existence of a positive allowable Lefschetz fibration on a compact Stein surface with boundary was established by Loi and Piergallini by using branched covering techniques. Here we give an alternative simple proof of this fact and…

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.…