Related papers: Partial twists and exotic Stein fillings

We provide the first information on diffeotopy groups of exotic smoothings of R^4: For each of uncountably many smoothings, there are uncountably many isotopy classes of self-diffeomorphisms. We realize these by various explicit group…

We study smooth, proper embeddings of noncompact surfaces in 4-manifolds, focusing on exotic planes and annuli, i.e., embeddings pairwise homeomorphic to the standard embeddings of R^2 and R^2-int D^2 in R^4. We encounter two uncountable…

Our earlier twisted-face-pairing construction showed how to modify an arbitrary orientation-reversing face-pairing on a faceted 3-ball in a mechanical way so that the quotient is automatically a closed, orientable 3-manifold. The…

A new pair of asymptotic invariants for finitely presented groups, called intrinsic and extrinsic tame filling functions, are introduced. These filling functions are quasi-isometry invariants that strengthen the notions of intrinsic and…

We present a unified framework to systematically embed complex knotted and linked structures, beyond the torus family, into diverse topological phases, including Hopf insulators, classical spin liquids, topological semimetals, and…

We consider tight contact structures on plumbed 3-manifolds with no bad vertices. We discuss how one can count the number of tight contact structures with zero Giroux torsion on such 3-manifolds and explore conditions under which Giroux…

We use symplectic cohomology to study the non-uniqueness of symplectic structures on the smooth manifolds underlying affine varieties. Starting with a Lefschetz fibration on such a variety and a finite set of primes, the main new tool is a…

We construct a number of topologically trivial but smoothly non-trivial families of embeddings of 3-manifolds in 4-manifolds. These include embeddings of homology spheres in $S^4$ that are not isotopic but have diffeomorphic complements,…

For each integer n\ge 2, we construct an irreducible, smooth, complex projective variety M of dimension n, whose fundamental group has infinitely generated homology in degree n+1 and whose universal cover is a Stein manifold, homotopy…

We realize higher-form symmetries in F-theory compactifications on non-compact elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau manifolds. Central to this endeavour is the topology of the boundary of the non-compact elliptic fibration, as well as the…

The symplectization of an overtwisted contact structure in Euclidean 3--space is shown to be an exotic symplectic structure on Euclidean 4--space. The technique can be extended to produce exotic symplectic structures in higher dimensional…

Let X be a Stein manifold, A a closed complex subvariety of X, and f a continuous map from X to a complex manifold Y whose restriction to A is holomorphic. After a homotopic deformation of the Stein structure outside a neighborhood of A in…

Let T(N) be the subgroup of the mapping class group of a nonorientable surface N (possibly with punctures and/or boundary components) generated by twists about two-sided circles. We obtain a simple generating set for T(N). As an application…

Let Q be a Riemannian manifold such that the Betti numbers of its free loop space with respect to some coefficient field are unbounded. We show that every contact form on its unit contangent bundle supporting the natural contact structure…

We establish constraints on the topology of smooth Lefschetz fibrations with $4$-dimensional fibers, by studying the family Bauer-Furuta invariant. To compute this invariant, we analyze the framed bordism class of 1-dimensional…

Attaching a Casson handle to a slice disk complement yields a smooth 4-manifold that is homeomorphic to $\mathbb{R}^4$. We show that if two slice knots have sufficiently different knot Floer homology, then the resulting exotic…

We prove a general fusion theorem for complete orientable minimal surfaces in $\mathbb{R}^3$ with finite total curvature. As a consequence, complete orientable minimal surfaces of weak finite total curvature with exotic geometry are…

It is shown that three-dimensional systems of coupled quantum wires support fractional topological phases composed of closed loops and open planes of two-dimensional fractional quantum Hall subsystems. These phases have topologically…

We construct new families of non-hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations by applying the daisy substitutions to the families of words $(c_1c_2 \cdots c_{2g-1}c_{2g}{c_{2g+1}}^2c_{2g}c_{2g-1} \cdots c_2c_1)^2 = 1$, $(c_1c_2 \cdots…

We produce a large class of hyperbolic homology 3-spheres admitting arbitrarily many distinct tight contact structures. We also produce a sub-class admitting arbitrarily many distinct tight contact structures within the same homotopy class…