Related papers: Exotic structures and adjunction inequality

Infinitely many contact 3-manifolds each admitting infinitely many, pairwise non-diffeomorphic Stein fillings are constructed. We use Lefschetz fibrations in our constructions and compute their first homologies to distinguish the fillings.

Short introduction to exotic differential structures on manifolds is given. The possible physical context of this mathematical curiosity is discussed. The topic is very interesting although speculative.

We give arguments that exotic smooth structures on compact and noncompact 4-manifolds are essential for some approaches to quantum gravity. We rely on the recently developed model-theoretic approach to exotic smoothness in dimension four.…

In this work, we prove that every complex contact structure gives rise to a distinguished type of almost contact metric 3-structure. As an application of our main result, we provide several new examples of manifolds which admit taut contact…

In this article we consider a version of the geography question for simply-connected symplectic 4-manifolds that takes into account the divisibility of the canonical class as an additional parameter. We also find new examples of 4-manifolds…

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…

The polynomial invariants $q_d$ for a large class of smooth 4-manifolds are shown to satisfy universal relations. The relations reflect the possible genera of embedded surfaces in the 4-manifold and lead to a structure theorem for the…

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…

In recent times a great amount of progress has been achieved in symplectic and contact geometry, leading to the development of powerful invariants of 3-manifolds such as Heegaard Floer homology and embedded contact homology. These…

The topology of Stein surfaces and contact 3-manifolds is studied by means of handle decompositions. A simple characterization of homeomorphism types of Stein surfaces is obtained --- they correspond to open handlebodies with all handles of…

This paper examines the broad structure on Stein manifolds and how it generalizes the notion of a domain of holomorphy in $\mathbb C^n$. Along with this generalization, we see that Stein manifolds share key properties from domains of…

This survey aims to provide a guide to the literature on topological 4-manifolds. Foundational theorems on 4-manifolds are stated, especially in the topological category. Precise references are given, with indications of the strategies…

In a recent paper of Akhmedov, Etnyre, Mark and Smith, it was shown that there exist infinitely many contact Seifert fibered 3-manifolds each of which admits infinitely many exotic (homeomorphic but pairwise non-diffeomorphic)…

In this article we conjecture a 4-dimensional characterization of tightness: a contact structure is tight if and only if a slice-Bennequin inequality holds for smoothly embedded surfaces in Yx[0,1]. An affirmative answer to our conjecture…

The symplectization of an overtwisted contact structure in Euclidean 3--space is shown to be an exotic symplectic structure on Euclidean 4--space. The technique can be extended to produce exotic symplectic structures in higher dimensional…

In this article, we give new means of constructing and distinguishing closed exotic four-manifolds. Using Heegaard Floer homology, we define new closed four-manifold invariants that are distinct from the Seiberg--Witten and Bauer--Furuta…

We prove that a relatively compact pseudoconvex domain with smooth boundary in an almost complex manifold admits a bounded strictly plurisubharmonic exhaustion function. We use this result for the study of convexity and hyperbolicity…

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…

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…

We investigate how exotic differential structures may reveal themselves in particle physics. The analysis is based on the A. Connes' construction of the standard model. It is shown that, if one of the copies of the spacetime manifold is…