Related papers: Exotic Smooth Structures on Small 4-Manifolds

The main result of this paper states that a symplectic s-cobordism of elliptic 3-manifolds is diffeomorphic to a product (assuming a canonical contact structure on the boundary). Based on this theorem, we conjecture that a smooth…

We construct stable minimal hypersurfaces with simple topology in certain compact $4$-manifolds $X$ with boundary, where $X$ embeds into a smooth manifold homeomorphic to $S^4$. For example, if $X$ is equipped with a Riemannian metric $g$…

Two constructions of contact manifolds are presented: (i) products of S^1 with manifolds admitting a suitable decomposition into two exact symplectic pieces and (ii) fibre connected sums along isotropic circles. Baykur has found a…

We classify four-dimensional manifolds endowed with symplectic pairs admitting embedded symplectic spheres with non-negative self-intersection, following the strategy of McDuff's classification of rational and ruled symplectic four…

We construct smooth 4-manifolds that are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to the "cusp" and the "fishtail", which are certain thickened singular 2-spheres.

We give several criteria on a closed, oriented 3-manifold that will imply that it is the boundary of a (simply connected) 4-manifold that admits infinitely many distinct smooth structures. We also show that any weakly fillable contact…

This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, we use symplectic homology to distinguish the contact structures on the Brieskorn manifolds $\Sigma(2l,2,2,2)$, which contact homology cannot distinguish. This answers a question from…

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,…

We consider simply-connected $4$-manifolds admitting Lefschetz fibrations over the $2$-sphere. We explicitly construct nonhyperelliptic and hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations of genus $4$ on simply-connected $4$-manifolds which are exotic…

These notes are adapted from two talks given at the 2004 Clay Institute Summer School on Floer homology, gauge theory, and low dimensional topology at the Alfred Renyi Institute. We will quickly review what we do and do not know about the…

We study symplectic structures on four-dimensional small covers. Our main result shows that every symplectic four-dimensional small cover is aspherical. We then classify symplectic small covers over products of two polygons, proving that…

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…

From a handlebody-theoretic perspective, the simplest compact, contractible 4-manifolds, other than the 4-ball, are Mazur manifolds. We produce the first pairs of Mazur manifolds that are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic. Our…

Motivated by and extending the technical results in our earlier work on symplectic Calabi-Yau $4$-manifolds, a general and systematic approach for studying certain unions of symplectic embedded surfaces in a rational $4$-manifold $X=CP^2\#…

In this note we prove that a four-dimensional compact oriented half-confor\-mally flat Riemannian manifold $M^4$ is topologically $\mathbb{S}^{4}$ or $\mathbb{C}\mathbb{P}^{2},$ provided that the sectional curvatures all lie in the interval…

We show that the pre-order defined on the category of contact manifolds by arbitrary symplectic cobordisms is considerably less rigid than its counterparts for exact or Stein cobordisms: in particular, we exhibit large new classes of…

This is a survey paper on the space of symplectic structures on closed 4-manifolds, for the Proceedings ICCM 2004

This paper studies the action of symplectic homeomorphisms on smooth submanifolds, with a main focus on the behaviour of symplectic homeomorphisms with respect to numerical invariants like capacities. Our main result is that a symplectic…

We develop the Gompf fiber connected sum operation for symplectic orbifolds. We use it to construct a symplectic 4-orbifold with $b_1=0$ and containing symplectic surfaces of genus 1 and 2 that are disjoint and span the rational homology.…

We show that the manifold *CP^2 # *RP^4, which is homotopy equivalent but not homeomorphic to CP^2 # RP^4, is in fact smoothable.