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

We prove that there exist infinitely many contractible compact smooth $4$-manifolds $C$ that admit absolutely exotic diffeomorphisms of infinite order in $\pi_0(\mathrm{Diff}(C))$. By ``absolutely", we mean that isotopies are not required…

We study the relationship between exotic R^4's and Stein surfaces as it applies to smoothing theory on more general open 4-manifolds. In particular, we construct the first known examples of large exotic R^4's that embed in Stein surfaces.…

We describe explicit open books on arbitrary plumbings of oriented circle bundles over closed oriented surfaces. We show that, for a non-positive plumbing, the open book we construct is horizontal and the corresponding compatible contact…

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

It is shown that there are infinitely many compact orientable smooth 4-manifolds which do not admit Einstein metrics, but nevertheless satisfy the strict Hitchin-Thorpe inequality 2 chi > 3 |tau|. The examples in question arise as…

We prove that closed connected contact manifolds of dimension $\geq 5$ related by an h-cobordism with a flexible Weinstein structure become contactomorphic after some kind of stabilization. We also provide examples of non-conjugate contact…

In this note we observe that one can contact embed all contact 3-manifolds into a Stein fillable contact structure on the twisted $S^3$-bundle over $S^2$ and also into a unique overtwisted contact structure on $S^3\times S^2$. These results…

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…

We show that any closed oriented 3-manifold can be topologically embedded in some simply-connected closed symplectic 4-manifold, and that it can be made a smooth embedding after one stabilization. As a corollary of the proof we show that…

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…

Given a contact structure on a manifold $V$ together with a supporting open book decomposition, Bourgeois gave an explicit construction for a contact structure on $V \times \mathbb{T}^2$. We prove that all such structures are universally…

One approach to produce a pair of homeomorphic-but-not-diffeomophic closed 4-manifolds is to find a knot which is smoothly slice in one but not the other. This approach has never been run successfully. We give the first examples of a pair…

We describe a collection of constructions which illustrate a panoply of ``exotic'' smooth 4-manifolds.

We construct using Lefschetz fibrations a large family of contact manifolds with the following properties: Any bounding contact embedding into an exact symplectic manifold satisfying a mild topological assumption is non-displaceable and…

We prove that there are infinitely many pairs of homeomorphic non-diffeomorphic smooth 4-manifolds, such that in each pair one manifold admits an Einstein metric and the other does not. We also show that there are closed 4-manifolds with…

We show that there are contact 3-manifolds of support genus one which admit infinitely many Stein fillings, but do not admit arbitrarily large ones. These Stein fillings arise from genus-1 allowable Lefschetz fibrations with distinct…

There is an intrinsic notion of what it means for a contact manifold to be the smooth boundary of a Stein manifold. The same concept has another more extrinsic formulation, which is often used as a convenient working hypothesis. We give a…

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

We construct smooth manifolds with order two $\pi_1$ and even intersection forms which are irreducible, meaning they do not decompose into non-trivial connected sums. Their intersection forms being even implies that their universal covers…

In this note we study contact structures on 5-dimensional manifolds. We give a complete answer under the assumption that the Abundance conjecture holds in dimension 5.