Related papers: Contact 5-manifolds and smooth structures on Stein…

We construct a contact 5-manifold supported by infinitely many distinct open books with the identity monodromy and pairwise exotic Stein pages (i.e. pages are pairwise homeomorphic but non-diffeomorphic Stein fillings of a fixed contact…

We consider a fixed contact 3-manifold that admits infinitely many compact Stein fillings which are all homeomorphic but pairwise non-diffeomorphic. Each of these fillings gives rise to a closed contact 5-manifold described as a contact…

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,…

According to Giroux, contact manifolds can be described as open books whose pages are Stein manifolds. For 5-dimensional contact manifolds the pages are Stein surfaces, which permit a description via Kirby diagrams. We introduce handle…

We show that there are vast families of contact 3-manifolds each member of which admits infinitely many Stein fillings with arbitrarily big euler characteristics and arbitrarily small signatures ---which disproves a conjecture of Stipsicz…

We reprove and strengthen some old difficult theorems of 4-manifolds by the aid of recently discovered modern tools, which involve contact structures on 3-manifolds, compact Stein domains, etc.

We show that there exist infinitely many simply connected compact Stein 4-manifolds with b_2=2 such that they are all homeomorhic but mutually non-diffeomorphic, and they are Stein fillings of the same contact 3-manifold on their…

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…

From any 4-dimensional oriented handlebody X without 3- and 4-handles and with b_2>0, we construct arbitrary many compact Stein 4-manifolds which are mutually homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to each other, so that their topological…

We introduce a new generalization of Gompf nuclei and give applications. We construct infinitely many exotic smooth structures for a large class of compact 4-manifolds with boundary, regarding topological invariants. We prove that a large…

For any integer $n\geq 2$, we construct an infinite family of Stein fillable contact $(4n-1)$-manifolds each of which admits infinitely many pairwise homotopy inequivalent Stein fillings.

Using recent work on high dimensional Lutz twists and families of Weinstein structures we show that any almost contact structure on a 5-manifold is homotopic to a contact structure.

We study the possibility of realizing exotic smooth structures on punctured simply connected $4$-manifolds as leaves of a codimension one foliation on a compact manifold. In particular, we show the existence of uncountably many smooth open…

We consider contact structures on simply-connected 5-manifolds which arise as circle bundles over simply-connected symplectic 4-manifolds and show that invariants from contact homology are related to the divisibility of the canonical class…

For a 4-manifold represented by a framed knot in $S^3$, it has been well known that the 4-manifold admits a Stein structure if the framing is less than the maximal Thurston-Bennequin number of the knot. In this paper, we prove either the…

We give several criteria on a closed, oriented 3-manifold that will imply that it is the boundary of a (simply connected) 4-manifold that admits infinitely many distinct smooth structures. We also show that any weakly fillable contact…

Loi and Piergallini showed that a smooth compact, connected $4$-manifold $X$ with boundary admits a Stein structure if and only if $X$ is a simple branched cover of a $4$-disk $D^4$ branched along a positive braided surface $S$ in a bidisk…

The aim of this paper is to give an alternative proof of a theorem about the existence of contact structures on five-manifolds due to Geiges. This theorem asserts that simply-connected five-manifolds admit a contact structure in every…

Infinitely many contact 3-manifolds each admitting infinitely many, pairwise non-diffeomorphic Stein fillings are constructed. We use Lefschetz fibrations in our constructions and compute their first homologies to distinguish the fillings.

We prove that the contact structures on Y= dX induced by non-homotopic Stein structures on the 4-manifold X have distinct Heegaard Floer invariants.