Related papers: The Akbulut cork is not universal

We establish the existence of a pair of exotic surfaces in a punctured $K3$ which remains exotic after one external stabilization and have diffeomorphic complements. A key ingredient in the proof is a vanishing theorem of the family…

We construct examples of simply connected nonalgebraic symplectic fourfolds with a prescribed number of nonintersecting symplectic curves with positive self-intersections.

Haken showed that the Heegaard splittings of reducible 3-manifolds are reducible, that is, a reducing 2-sphere can be found which intersects the Heegaard surface in a single simple closed curve. When the genus of the "interesting" surface…

Many noncompact hyperbolic 3-manifolds are topologically complements of links in the 3-sphere. Generalizing to dimension 4, we construct a dozen examples of noncompact hyperbolic 4-manifolds, all of which are topologically complements of…

For a simply-connected closed manifold $X$ of $\dim X \neq 4$, the mapping class group $\pi_0(\mathrm{Diff}(X))$ is known to be finitely generated. We prove that analogous finite generation fails in dimension 4. Namely, we show that there…

In a previous paper we have constructed an invariant of four-dimensional manifolds with boundary in the form of an element in the stable homotopy group of the Seiberg-Witten Floer spectrum of the boundary. Here we prove that when one glues…

In this paper we prove there are no families of cyclic $\Z_n$-covers of elliptic curves which generate non-compact Shimura (special) curves that lie generically in the Torelli locus $T_g$ of abelian varieties with $g\geq 8$ when $n$ has a…

We show that the smooth $4$-manifold $M$ obtained by attaching a $2$-handle to $B^4$ along a certain knot $K\subset \partial B^4$ admits infinitely many absolutely exotic copies $M_n$, $n=0,1,2..$, such that each copy $M_n$ is obtained by…

We classify nonnegatively curved simply connected 4-manifolds with circle symmetry up to equivariant diffeomorphisms. The main problem is rule out knotted curves in the singular set of the orbit space. As an extension of this work we…

We show that no exotic $\mathbb{R}^4$ admits a complete Riemannian metric with uniformly positive isotropic curvature and with bounded geometry. This is essentially a corollary of the main result in [Hu1], and was stated in [Hu2] without…

We construct an invariant of open four-manifolds using the Heegaard Floer theory of Ozsvath and Szabo. We show that there is a manifold X homeomorphic to R^4 for which the invariant is non-trivial, showing that X is an exotic R^4.

We construct several new classes of isospectral manifolds with different local geometries. After reviewing a theorem by Carolyn Gordon on isospectral torus bundles and presenting certain useful specialized versions (Chapter 1) we apply…

This is a survey on known results and open problems about closed aspherical manifolds, i.e., connected closed manifolds whose universal coverings are contractible. Many examples come from certain kinds of non-positive curvature conditions.…

Given any connected, open 3-manifold $U$ having finitely many ends, a non-compact 3-manifold $M$ is constructed having the following properties: the interior of $M$ is homeomorphic to $U$; the boundary of $M$ is the disjoint union of…

The aim of this paper is to produce infinite exotic structures on smooth closed oriented $4-$manifolds with fundamental group isomorphic to the infinite dihedral group, assuming that $b_2^+$ and $b_2^-$ are at least $12$.

In this paper we find the first infinite family of hyperbolic 3-manifolds which admit tight contact structures but do not have any tight projectively Anosov flow. These manifolds are obtained as rational surgeries on the figure eight knot.

Here we give a concrete description of the cork automorphism $f:\partial W\to \partial W$ of the infinite order loose-cork $(W,f)$, defined in \cite{a2}. It is obtained by concatenating the defining ribbon disk of $W$ in $B^4$ by an…

We construct an infinite family of simply connected, pairwise nondiffeomorphic 4-manifolds, all homeomorphic to 3CP^2 blown up at 9 points.

We show the existence of infinitely many knot exteriors where each of which contains meridional essential surfaces of any genus and (even) number of boundary components. That is, the compact surfaces that have a meridional essential…

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…