Related papers: Corks for exotic diffeomorphisms

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 finitely presented group with an index two subgroup is realized as the fundamental group of a closed smooth non-orientable four-manifold that admits an exotic smooth structure, which is obtained by performing a Gluck twist.…

We investigate two specific contractible manifolds (one Stein, and the other non-Stein) whose boundaries have non-trivial mapping class groups. In both cases we show that every diffeomorphism of their boundary extends to a diffeomorphism of…

We prove that a compactly supported homeomorphism of a smooth manifold of dimension greater or equal to 5 can be approximated uniformly by compactly supported diffeomorphisms if and only if it is isotopic to a diffeomorphism. If the given…

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…

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…

Any two homologous surfaces of the same genus embedded in a smooth 4-manifold X with simply-connected complements are shown to be smoothly isotopic in the connected sum of X and the product of a 2-sphere with itself, if the surfaces are…

Conjecturally, a knot is slice if and only if its positive Whitehead double is slice. We consider an analogue of this conjecture for slice disks in the four-ball: two slice disks of a knot are smoothly isotopic if and only if their positive…

We construct exotic copies of $\mathbb{R}^4$ with nontrivial compactly supported mapping class groups of arbitrarily large rank. This follows from a modification of the construction of the diffeomorphism corks of arXiv:2407.04696 that makes…

In this paper, we completely classify all compact 4-manifolds with positive isotropic curvature. We show that they are diffeomorphic to $\mathbb{S}^4,$ or $\mathbb{R}\mathbb{P}^4$ or quotients of $\mathbb{S}^3\times \mathbb{R}$ by a…

We prove:(1) the existence, for every integer n > 3, of a noncompact smooth n-dimensional topological manifold whose diffeomorphism group contains an isomorphic copy of every finitely presented group; (2) a finiteness theorem on finite…

For a compact $(2n+1)$-dimensional smooth manifold, let $\mu_M : B Diff_\partial (D^{2n+1}) \to B Diff (M)$ be the map that is defined by extending diffeomorphisms on an embedded disc by the identity. By a classical result of Farrell and…

We show that many explicit examples of exotic pairs of surfaces in a smooth 4-manifold become smoothly isotopic after one external stabilization with $S^2\times S^2$ or $CP^2\#\overline{CP^2}$. Our results cover surfaces produced by…

Given a closed, smooth 4-manifold $X$ and self-diffeomorphism $f$ that is topologically pseudo-isotopic to the identity, we study the question of whether $f$ is moreover smoothly pseudo-isotopic to the identity. If the fundamental group of…

We initiate the study of exotic Dehn twists along 3-manifolds $\neq S^3$ inside $4$-manifolds, which produces the first known examples of exotic diffeomorphisms of contractible 4-manifolds, more generally of definite 4-manifolds, and exotic…

A diffeomorphism $f$ of a compact manifold $X$ is pseudo-isotopic to the identity if there is a diffeomorphism $F$ of $X\times I$ which restricts to $f$ on $X\times 1$, and which restricts to the identity on $X\times 0$ and $\partial…

This note serves to record examples of diffeomorphisms of closed smooth $4$-manifolds $X$ that are homotopic but not pseudoisotopic to the identity, and to explain why there are no such examples when $X$ is orientable and its fundamental…

We construct infinitely many smooth oriented 4-manifolds containing pairs of homotopic, smoothly embedded 2-spheres that are not topologically isotopic, but that are equivalent by an ambient diffeomorphism inducing the identity on homology.…

We say that a fixed point of a diffeomorphism is non-degenerate if 1 is not an eigenvalue of the linearization at the fixed point. We use pseudo-holomorphic curves techniques to prove the following: the inclusion map $$i: \text{Diff} ^{1}…

Consider a connected manifold of dimension at least two and the group of compactly supported diffeomorphisms that are compactly supported isotopic to the identity. This group acts $n$-transitive: Any tuple of $n$ points can be moved to any…