Related papers: Irreducible 4-manifolds can admit exotic diffeomor…
We explicitly construct genus-2 Lefschetz fibrations whose total spaces are minimal symplectic 4-manifolds homeomorphic to complex rational surfaces CP^2 # p (-CP^2) for p=7, 8, 9, and to 3 CP^2 #q (-CP^2) for q =12,...,19. Complementarily,…
We show that, under a certain condition, contact 5-manifolds can `coarsely' distinguish smooth structures on compact Stein 4-manifolds via contact open books. We also give a simple sufficient condition for an infinite family of Stein…
We construct algebraic families of exotic affine 3-spheres, that is, smooth affine threefolds diffeomorphic to a non-degenerate smooth complex affine quadric of dimension 3 but non algebraically isomorphic to it. We show in particular that…
We solve a certain case of the minimal genus problem for embedded surfaces in elliptic 4-manifolds. The proofs involve a restricted transitivity property of the action of the orientation preserving diffeomorphism group on the second…
This paper investigates the exotic phenomena exhibited by links of disconnected surfaces with boundary that are properly embedded in the 4-ball. Our main results provide two different constructions of exotic pairs of surface links that are…
We show the existence of a $4$-manifold with boundary that admits two non-diffeomorphic minimal genus relative trisections of the same $(g,k;p,b)$-type. To prove this, we introduce a simple operation that produces a trisection diagram of a…
We give an example of a smooth characteristic embedding of a torus in $\s^2 \times \s^2 \# \s^1 \times \s^3$ such that there exists no diffeomorphism of the ambient $4$-manifold that induces the Dehn twist along a meridian of the torus, but…
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 prove that a compact smooth 4-manifold admits generalized complex structures of odd type if and only if it has a transversely holomorphic 2-foliation. Consequently, there exist generalized complex structures of odd type on a circle…
We construct examples of simply connected nonalgebraic symplectic fourfolds with a prescribed number of nonintersecting symplectic curves with positive self-intersections.
A homeomorphism of a 3-manifold M is said to be Dehn twists on the boundary when its restriction to the boundary of M is isotopic to the identity on the complement of a collection of disjoint simple closed curves in the boundary of M. In…
We construct infinitely many manifolds admitting both strongly irreducible and weakly reducible minimal genus Heegaard splittings. Both closed manifolds and manifolds with boundary tori are constructed.
We show that any homologically non-trivial Dehn twist of a compact surface F with boundary is the lifting of a half-twist in the braid group B_n, with respect to a suitable branched covering p : F -> B^2. In particular, we allow the surface…
We give a characterization of irreducible symplectic fourfolds which are given as Hilbert scheme of points on a K3 surface.
We show that a 3-manifold containing an incompressible surface has topologically minimal surfaces of arbitrary high genus.
The essential role played by differentiable structures in physics is reviewed in light of recent mathematical discoveries that topologically trivial space-time models, especially the simplest one, ${\bf R^4}$, possess a rich multiplicity of…
We study some special almost complex structures on strictly pseudoconvex domains. They appear naturally as limits under a nonisotroping scaling procedure and play a role of model objects in the geometry of almost complex manifolds with…
Model-theoretic aspects of exotic smoothness were studied long ago uncovering unexpected relations to noncommutative spaces and quantum theory. Some of these relations were worked out in detail in later work. An important point in the…
Given a closed four-manifold $X$ with an indefinite intersection form, we consider smoothly embedded surfaces in $X \setminus $int$(B^4)$, with boundary a knot $K \subset S^3$. We give several methods to bound the genus of such surfaces in…
We introduce a class of rotationally invariant manifolds, which we call \emph{admissible}, on which the wave flow satisfies smoothing and Strichartz estimates. We deduce the global existence of equivariant wave maps from admissible…