Related papers: Partial twists and exotic Stein fillings

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…

Inspired by a recent result of Levine-Lidman-Piccirillo, we construct infinitely many exotic smooth structures on some closed four-manifolds with definite intersection form and fundamental group isomorphic to $\Z /2\Z$. Similar…

We use a variation of a classical construction of A. Hatcher to construct virtually all stable exotic smooth structures on compact smooth manifold bundles whose fibers have sufficiently large odd dimension (at least twice the base dimension…

We show that contact homology distinguishes infinitely many tight contact structures on any orientable, toroidal, irreducible 3-manifold. As a consequence of the contact homology computations, on a very large class of toroidal manifolds,…

Recent advanced experimental implementations of optical lattices with highly tunable geometry open up new regimes for quantum many-body states of matter that previously had not been accessible. Here we introduce a symmetry-based method of…

This paper grew out of an attempt to find a suitable finite sheeted covering of an aspherical 3-manifold so that the cover either has infinite or trivial first homology group. With this motivation we define a new class of groups. These…

We produce infinitely many distinct irreducible smooth 4-manifolds homeomorphic to #(2m+1)(CP^2 # -CP^2) and #(2n+1)(S^2 x S^2), respectively, for each m>3 and n>4. These provide the smallest exotic closed simply connected 4-manifolds with…

A spinal open book decomposition on a contact manifold is a generalization of a supporting open book which exists naturally e.g. on the boundary of a symplectic filling with a Lefschetz fibration over any compact oriented surface with…

In this article we construct a family of knot surgery $4$-manifolds admitting arbitrarily many nonisomorphic Lefschetz fibration structures with the same genus fiber. We obtain such families by performing knot surgery on an elliptic surface…

In this note we will determine which contact structures on manifolds obtained by certain surgeries on the right handed trefoil are Stein fillable and which are not. This continues a long line of research and shows that there seems to be few…

It is known by A. Loi and R. Piergallini that a closed, oriented, smooth 3-manifold is Stein fillable if and only if it has a positive open book decomposition. In the present paper we will show that for every link L in a Stein fillable…

We consider the action of symplectic monodromy on chain-level enhancements of quantum cohomology. First, we construct a family version of $A_\infty$-structure on quantum cohomology (this should morally correspond to Hochschild cohomology of…

We construct open symplectic manifolds which are convex at infinity ("Liouville manifolds") and which are diffeomorphic, but not symplectically isomorphic, to cotangent bundles T^*S^{n+1}, for any n+1 \geq 3. These manifolds are constructed…

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 show that the pre-order defined on the category of contact manifolds by arbitrary symplectic cobordisms is considerably less rigid than its counterparts for exact or Stein cobordisms: in particular, we exhibit large new classes of…

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 a large family F of torus bundles over the circle, and we use recent work of Li--Mak to construct, on each Y in F, a Stein fillable contact structure C. We prove that (i) each Stein filling of (Y,C) has vanishing first Chern…

For each nonnegative integer m we show that any closed, oriented topological four-manifold with fundamental group Z_{4m+2} and odd intersection form, with possibly seven exceptions, either admits no smooth structure or admits infinitely…

We construct uncountably many finitely generated, pairwise non-isomorphic torsion-free groups, all of which fall into the same quasi-isometry class. This is done by considering Schur covering groups and group cohomology, with the necessary…

In a previous work, we introduced a simple and systematic method for constructing a positive allowable Lefschetz fibration (PALF) from a 2-handlebody decomposition of a given Stein surface. In this paper, we present a combinatorial…