Related papers: Absolutely exotic compact 4-manifolds

It is shown that any finite list of smooth closed simply-connected 4-manifolds homeomorphic to a given one X can be obtained by removing a single compact contractible submanifold (or cork) from X, and then regluing it by powers of a…

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 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…

It is known that there is a unique concordance class in the free homotopy class of $S^1\times pt \subset S^1 \times S^2$. The constructive proof of this fact is given by the second author. It turns out that all the concordances in this…

Ruberman in the 90's showed that the group of exotic diffeomorphisms of closed 4-manifolds can be infinitely generated. We provide various results on the question of when such infinite generation can localize to a smaller embedded…

This paper studies properly embedded surfaces in the 4-ball that are exotically knotted (i.e., topologically but not smoothly isotopic), and leverages this local phenomenon to study surfaces in larger 4-manifolds. The main results provide a…

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…

Here we study two interesting smooth contractible manifolds, whose boundaries have non-trivial mapping class groups. The first one is a non-Stein contractible manifold, such that every self diffeomorphism of its boundary extends inside;…

We construct infinitely many pairwise non-diffeomorphic smooth structures on a definite $4$-manifold with non-cyclic fundamental group $\mathbb{Z}/2\times \mathbb{Z}/2$.

We show that two properly embedded compact surfaces in an orientable 4-manifold are cobordant if and only if they are $\mathbb{Z}/2$-homologous and either the 4-manifold has boundary or the surfaces have the same normal Euler number. If the…

We classify topological $4$-manifolds with boundary and fundamental group $\mathbb{Z}$, under some assumptions on the boundary. We apply this to classify surfaces in simply-connected $4$-manifolds with $S^3$ boundary, where the fundamental…

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 construct an infinite family $\{ C_{n,k}\}_{k=1}^{\infty}$ of corks of Mazur type satisfying $2n\leq \mathrm{sc}^{\mathrm{sp}}(C_{n,k})\leq O(n^{3/2})$ for any positive integer $n$. Furthermore, using these corks, we construct an…

For suitable finite groups G, we construct contractible 4-manifolds C with an effective G-action on $\partial C$ whose associated pairs (C,g) for all $g \in G$ are distinct smoothings of the pair $(C,\partial C)$. Indeed C embeds in a…

We introduce a variant of contact homology for convex open contact manifolds. As an application, we prove the existence of (in fact, infinitely many) exotic tight contact structures on $\mathbb{R}^{2n-1}$ for all $n>2$.

We construct a compact PL 5-manifold $M$ (with boundary) which is homotopy equivalent to the wedge of eleven 2-spheres, $\vee^{}_{1 1}S^2$, which is "spineless", meaning $M$ is not the regular neighborhood of any 2-complex PL embedded in…

We construct the first examples of non-smoothable self-homeomorphisms of smooth $4$-manifolds with boundary that fix the boundary and act trivially on homology. As a corollary, we construct self-diffeomorphisms of $4$-manifolds with…

We show that any simply connected topological closed $4$-manifold punctured along any compact, totally disconnected tame subset $\Lambda$ admits a continuum of smoothings which are not diffeomorphic to any leaf of a $C^{1,0}$ codimension…

We construct orbifolds with quasitoric boundary and show that they have stable almost complex structure. We show that a quasitoric orbifold is complex cobordant to finite disjoint copies of complex orbifold projective spaces. Finally some…

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…