Related papers: Corks and exotic ribbons in $B^{4}$
We resolve parts (A) and (B) of Problem 1.100 from Kirby's list by showing that many nontrivial links arise as cross-sections of unknotted holomorphic disks in the four-ball. The techniques can be used to produce unknotted ribbon surfaces…
A cork is a smooth, contractible, oriented, compact 4-manifold $W$ together with a self-diffeomorphism $f$ of the boundary 3-manifold that cannot extend to a self-diffeomorphism of $W$; the cork is said to be strong if $f$ cannot extend to…
We prove that there exist diffeomorphisms of tori, supported in a disc, which are not isotopic to symplectomorphisms with respect to any symplectic structure. This yields a partial negative answer to a question of Benson and Gordon about…
A short survey of exotic smooth structutes on 4-manifolds is given with a special emphasis on the corresponding cork structures. Along the way we discuss some of the more recent results in this direction, obtained jointly with R.Matveyev,…
Every exotic pair in 4-dimension is obtained each other by twisting a {\it cork} or {\it plug} which are codimension 0 submanifolds embedded in the 4-manifolds. The twist was an involution on the boundary of the submanifold. We define cork…
We prove that every 4-dimensional oriented handlebody without 3- and 4-handles can be modified to admit infinitely many exotic smooth structures, and moreover prove that their genus functions are pairwise equivalent. We furthermore show…
We show how to construct absolutely exotic smooth structures on compact 4-manifolds with boundary, including contractible manifolds. In particular, we prove that any compact smooth 4-manifold W with boundary that admits a relatively exotic…
The author recently proved the existence of an infinite order cork: a compact, contractible submanifold $C$ of a 4-manifold and an infinite order diffeomorphism $f$ of $\partial C$ such that cutting out $C$ and regluing it by distinct…
We consider ribbon $R^4$'s, that is, smooth open 4-manifolds, homeomorphic to $R^4$ and associated to $h$-cobordisms between closed 4-manifolds. We show that any generalized ribbon $R^4$ associated to a sequence of $h$-cobordisms between…
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…
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 characterise boundary shaped disc like neighbourhoods of certain isotropic submanifolds in terms of aperiodicity of Reeb flows. We prove uniqueness of homotopy and diffeomorphism type of such contact manifolds assuming non-existence of…
We exhibit infinitely many exotic pairs of simply-connected, closed $4$-manifolds not related by any cork of the infinite family $W_n$ constructed by Akbulut and Yasui whose first member is the Akbulut cork. In particular, the Akbulut cork…
We construct closed, aspherical, smooth 4-manifolds that are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic. These provide counterexamples to a smooth analog of the Borel conjecture in dimension four. Our technique is to apply the `reflection group…
A revised proof of the author's earlier result is given. It is shown that a boundary surface-link in the 4-sphere is a ribbon surface-link if the surface-link obtained from it by surgery along a pairwise nontrivial fusion 1-handle system is…
It is known that the only Stein filling of the standard contact structure on S^3 is B^4. In this paper, we construct simply connected exotic compact Stein 4-manifold pairs for any Betti number $b_2 \geq 1$; we do this by enlarging corks and…
In this short note we describe a simple adaptation of biharmonic surfaces to interpolate boundary cross-derivatives given in ribbon form, and compare with the recently proposed Generalized B-spline patches.
We answer a question of Livingston from 1982 by producing Seifert surfaces of the same genus for a knot in $S^3$ that do not become isotopic when their interiors are pushed into $B^4$. In particular, we identify examples where the surfaces…
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 an orientable ribbon surface F in B^4, which is universal in the following sense: any compact orientable pl 4-manifold having a handle decomposition with 0-, 1- and 2-handles can be represented as a cover of B^4 branched over…