Related papers: $E_8$-plumbings and exotic contact structures on s…
We discover a host of infinite periodic families in the 2-primary stable homotopy groups of spheres. We also confirm the existence of many families predicted by Hopkins--Mahowald. These families appear in nineteen different congruence…
We construct an infinite family of odd-symplectic forms (also known as Hamiltonian structures) on the 3-sphere that do not admit a symplectic cobordism to the standard contact structure on the 3-sphere. This answers in the negative a…
We construct series of examples of exotic smooth structures on compact locally symmetric spaces of noncompact type. In particular, we obtain higher rank examples, which do not support Riemannian metric of nonpositive curvature. The examples…
We construct examples of volume-preserving uniquely ergodic (and hence minimal) real-analytic diffeomorphisms on odd-dimemsional spheres
We construct (infinitely many) examples in all dimensions of contactomorphisms of closed overtwisted contact manifolds that are smoothly isotopic but not contact-isotopic to the identity.
Consider cotangent bundles of exotic spheres, with their canonical symplectic structure. They admit automorphisms which preserve the part at infinity of one fibre, and which are analogous to the square of a Dehn twist. Pursuing that…
In discrete geometry, the contact number of a given finite number of non-overlapping spheres was introduced as a generalization of Newton's kissing number. This notion has not only led to interesting mathematics, but has also found…
We study invariant contact p-spheres on principal circle-bundles and solve the corresponding existence problem in dimension 3. Moreover, we show that contact p-spheres can only exist on (4n-1)-dimensional manifolds and we construct examples…
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…
Existence of a complex structure on the $6$ dimensional sphere is proved in this paper. The proof is based on re-interpreting a hypothetical complex structure as a classical ground state of a Yang--Mills--Higgs-like theory on $S^6$. This…
An elementary argument to show nonexistence.
We prove the existence of extremal Sasakian structures occurring on a countably infinite number of distinct contact structures on $T^2\times S^3$ and certain related manifolds. These structures occur in bouquets and exhaust the Sasaki cones…
We explore the construction of Legendrian spheres in contact manifolds of any dimension. Two constructions involving open books work in any contact manifold, while one introduced by Ekholm works only in $\mathbb{R}^{2n+1}$. We show that…
I review several proofs for non-existence of orthogonal complex structures on the six-sphere, most notably by G. Bor and L. Hernandez-Lamoneda, but also by K. Sekigawa and L. Vanhecke that we generalize for metrics close to the round one.…
We study a class of exceptional minimal surfaces in spheres for which all Hopf differentials are holomorphic. Extending results of Eschenburg and Tribuzy \cite{ET0}, we obtain a description of exceptional surfaces in terms of a set of…
We explain in some detail the geometric structure of spheres in any dimension. Our approach may be helpful for other homogeneous spaces (with other signatures) such as the de Sitter and anti-de Sitter spaces. We apply the procedure to the…
We use the Boothby-Wang fibration to construct certain simply connected K-contact manifolds and we give sufficient and necessary conditions on when such K-contact manifolds are homeomorphic to the odd dimensional spheres. If the symplectic…
We call a packing of hyperspheres in $n$ dimensions an Apollonian sphere packing if the spheres intersect tangentially or not at all; they fill the $n$-dimensional space; and every sphere in the packing is a member of a cluster of $n+2$…
We present an infinite sequence of smooth embeddings of a connected sum of 6 projective planes in the 4-sphere, which are all ambient homeomorphic, but pairwise ambient non-diffeomorphic. The double covers of the 4-sphere ramified along…
In this note we study contact structures on 5-dimensional manifolds. We give a complete answer under the assumption that the Abundance conjecture holds in dimension 5.