Related papers: Construction of Exotic Smooth Structures

We introduce a surgery for generalized complex manifolds whose input is a symplectic 4-manifold containing a symplectic 2-torus with trivial normal bundle and whose output is a 4-manifold endowed with a generalized complex structure…

Under certain homological hypotheses on a compact 4-manifold, we prove exactness of the topological surgery sequence at the stably smoothable normal invariants. The main examples are the class of finite connected sums of 4-manifolds with…

In this article we use the technique of Luttinger surgery to produce small examples of simply connected and non-simply connected minimal symplectic 4-manifolds. In particular, we construct: (1) An example of a minimal symplectic 4-manifold…

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 show that there is a complex structure on the symplectic 4-manifold $W_{4, k}$ obtained from the elliptic surface E(4) by rationally blowing down $k$ sections for $2\le k\le 9$. And we interpret it via ${\mathbb Q}$-Gorenstein smoothing.…

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…

Inspired by a recent result of Levine-Lidman-Piccirillo, we construct infinitely many exotic smooth structures on some closed four-manifolds with definite intersection form and fundamental group isomorphic to $\Z /2\Z$. Similar…

In this article, we construct countably many mutually non-isotopic diffeomorphisms of some closed non simply-connected 4-manifolds that are homotopic to but not isotopic to the identity, by surgery along $\Theta$-graphs. As corollaries of…

In this article we construct a family of knot surgery $4$-manifolds admitting arbitrarily many nonisomorphic Lefschetz fibration structures with the same genus fiber. We obtain such families by performing knot surgery on an elliptic surface…

This paper provides a topological method to construct all simply-connected, spin, smooth $6$-manifolds with torsion-free homology using simply-connected, smooth $4$-manifolds as building blocks. We explicitly determine the invariants that…

The construction of knots via annular twisting has been used to create families of knots yielding the same manifold via Dehn surgery. Prior examples have all involved Dehn surgery where the surgery slope is an integral multiple of 2. In…

We introduce a diffeomorphism invariant of $4$-manifolds, the $\mathrm{Pin}^-(2)$-monopole invariant, defined by using the $\mathrm{Pin}^-(2)$-monopole equations. We compute the invariants of several $4$-manifolds, and prove gluing…

Some generalizations and variations of the Fintushel-Stern rim surgery are known to produce smoothly knotted surfaces. We show that if the fundamental groups of their complements are cyclic, then these surfaces are topologically unknotted.…

We construct a number of topologically trivial but smoothly non-trivial families of embeddings of 3-manifolds in 4-manifolds. These include embeddings of homology spheres in $S^4$ that are not isotopic but have diffeomorphic complements,…

Suppose that $C=(C_1,..., C_m)$ is a configuration of 2-dimensional symplectic submanifolds in a symplectic 4-manifold $(X,\omega)$ with connected, negative definite intersection graph $\Gamma_C$. We show that by replacing an appropriate…

This is a survey article about the connections between knot theory and four-dimensional topology. Every four-manifold can be represented in terms of a link, by a Kirby diagram. This point of view has led to progress in computing invariants…

In \cite{AP3, AHP}, the first author and his collaborators constructed the irreducible symplectic $4$-manifolds that are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to $(2n-1){\mathbb{CP}}^{2}\#(2n-1)\overline{\mathbb{CP}}^{2}$ for each integer $n…

We describe a procedure to construct infinite sets of pairwise smoothly inequivalent 2-spheres in simply connected 4-manifolds, which are topologically isotopic and whose complement has a prescribed fundamental group that satisfies some…

We calculate the Seiberg-Witten invariants of branched covers of prime degree, where the branch locus consists of embedded spheres. Aside from the formula itself, our calculations give rise to some new constraints on configurations of…

We construct invariants of four-dimensional piecewise-linear manifolds, represented as simplicial complexes, with respect to rebuildings that transform a cluster of three 4-simplices having a common two-dimensional face in a different…