Related papers: A fake cusp and a fishtail

We provide an approach to study exotic phenomena in relatively small 4-manifolds that captures many different exotic behaviors under one umbrella. These phenomena include exotic smooth structures on 4-manifolds with $b_2=1$, examples of…

D. D. Long and A. W. Reid have shown that some compact flat 3-manifold cannot be diffeomorphic to a cusp cross-section of any complete finite volume 1-cusped real hyperbolic 4-manifold. This note concerns the complex hyperbolic case. We…

Akbulut has recently shown that an infinite family of Cappell-Shaneson homotopy 4-spheres is diffeomorphic to the standard 4-sphere. In the present paper, a strictly larger family is shown to be standard by a simpler method. This new…

We define cusp-decomposable manifolds and prove smooth rigidity within this class of manifolds. These manifolds generally do not admit a nonpositively curved metric but can be decomposed into pieces that are diffeomorphic to finite volume,…

We construct an infinite family of simply connected, pairwise nondiffeomorphic 4-manifolds, all homeomorphic to 3CP^2 blown up at 9 points.

A cutting and pasting operation on a $P^2$-knot $S$ in a $4$-manifold is called the Price twist. The Price twist for the $4$-sphere $S^4$ yields at most three $4$-manifolds up to diffeomorphism, namely, the $4$-sphere $S^4$, the other…

We produce infinitely many distinct irreducible smooth 4-manifolds homeomorphic to #(2m+1)(CP^2 # -CP^2) and #(2n+1)(S^2 x S^2), respectively, for each m>3 and n>4. These provide the smallest exotic closed simply connected 4-manifolds with…

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…

One strategy for distinguishing smooth structures on closed $4$-manifolds is to produce a knot $K$ in $S^3$ that is slice in one smooth filling $W$ of $S^3$ but not slice in some homeomorphic smooth filling $W'$. In this paper we explore…

We show that the group of smooth homotopy $7$-spheres acts freely on the set of smooth manifold structures on a topological manifold $M$ which is homotopy equivalent to the real projective $7$-space. We classify, up to diffeomorphism, all…

We introduce the concept of pseudo-trisections of smooth oriented compact 4-manifolds with boundary. The main feature of pseudo-trisections is that they have lower complexity than relative trisections for given 4-manifolds. We prove…

It is shown that any finite list of smooth closed simply-connected 4-manifolds homeomorphic to a given one X can be obtained by removing a single compact contractible submanifold (or cork) from X, and then regluing it by powers of a…

Here we study two interesting smooth contractible manifolds, whose boundaries have non-trivial mapping class groups. The first one is a non-Stein contractible manifold, such that every self diffeomorphism of its boundary extends inside;…

Every stable 4-sphere is identified with the double branched covering space of a trivial surface-knot space. As a result of Wall, it is known that any two orthogonal bases of every stable 4-sphere are transformed into each other by an…

Let $M$ be $\CP#2\CPb$, $3\CP#4\CPb$ or $(2n-1)\CP#2n\CPb$ for any integer $n\geq 3$. We construct an irreducible symplectic 4-manifold homeomorphic to $M$ and also an infinite family of pairwise non-diffeomorphic irreducible non-symplectic…

A pseudoisotopy of $M$ is a diffeomorphism of $M\times I$ which is the identity on $M\times 0$. We give an explicit construction of pseudoisotopies of 4-manifolds which realize certain elements of the "second obstruction to pseudoisotopy".…

We relate degree one grasper families of embedded circles to various constructions of diffeomorphisms found in the literature -- theta clasper classes of Watanabe, barbell diffeomorphisms of Budney and Gabai, and twin twists of Gay and…

We construct infinitely many smooth 4-manifolds which are homotopy equivalent to $S^2$ but do not admit a spine, i.e., a piecewise-linear embedding of $S^2$ which realizes the homotopy equivalence. This is the remaining case in the…

In this paper we study the structure of cellular pseudomanifolds (aka abstract polytopes). These are natural combinatorial generalisations of polytopal spheres (i.e., boundary complexes of convex polytopes). This class is closed under…

Quasifolds are singular spaces that generalize manifolds and orbifolds. They are locally modeled by manifolds modulo the smooth action of countable groups and they are typically not Hausdorff. If the countable groups happen to be all…