相关论文: From zero surgeries to candidates for exotic defin…
Manolescu and Piccirillo recently initiated a program to construct an exotic $S^4$ or $\# n \mathbb{CP}^2$ by using zero surgery homeomorphisms and Rasmussen's $s$-invariant. They find five knots that if any were slice, one could construct…
We show how to construct absolutely exotic smooth structures on compact 4-manifolds with boundary, including contractible manifolds. In particular, we prove that any compact smooth 4-manifold W with boundary that admits a relatively exotic…
We show that, for each integer n, there exist infinitely many pairs of n-framed knots representing homeomorphic but non-diffeomorphic (Stein) 4-manifolds, which are the simplest possible exotic 4-manifolds regarding handlebody structures.…
In this article, we construct infinitley many simply connected, nonsymplectic and pairwise nondiffeomorphic 4-manifolds starting from E(n) and applying the sequence of knot surgery, ordinary blowups and rational blowdown. We also compute…
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…
We generalize the RBG construction of Manolescu and Piccirillo to produce pairs of knots with the same $n$-surgery, and investigate the possibility of constructing exotic definite four-manifolds using $n$-surgery homeomorphisms.
It is well known that for any exotic pair of simply connected closed oriented 4-manifolds, one is obtained from the other by twisting a compact contractible submanifold via an involution on the boundary. By contrast, here we show that for…
A crucial step in the surgery-theoretic program to classify smooth manifolds is that of representing a middle--dimensional homology class by a smoothly embedded sphere. This step fails even for the simple 4-manifolds obtained from the…
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…
It is known that every exotic smooth structure on a simply connected closed 4-manifold is determined by a codimention zero compact contractible Stein submanifold and an involution on its boundary. Such a pair is called a cork. In this…
One approach to produce a pair of homeomorphic-but-not-diffeomophic closed 4-manifolds is to find a knot which is smoothly slice in one but not the other. This approach has never been run successfully. We give the first examples of a pair…
Since the first work on exotic smoothness in physics, it was folklore to assume a direct influence of exotic smoothness to quantum gravity. Thus, the negative result of Duston (arXiv:0911.4068) was a surprise. A closer look into the…
We introduce a new generalization of Gompf nuclei and give applications. We construct infinitely many exotic smooth structures for a large class of compact 4-manifolds with boundary, regarding topological invariants. We prove that a large…
We define an operation on homology ${B}^4$ which we call an $n$-twist annulus modification. We give a new construction of smoothly slice knots and exotically slice knots via $n$-twist annulus modifications. As an application, we present a…
A fundamental result in 4-manifold topology asserts that any two exotic smooth structures on a simply-connected, closed 4-manifold differ by a cork twist: the operation of removing a compact, contractible, codimension-zero submanifold and…
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…
Using the rational surgery formula for the Casson--Walker--Lescop invariant of links in the $3$-sphere, we show that any null-homologous knot in a rational homology sphere admits at most two pairs of integral purely cosmetic surgeries. We…
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…
Given a closed four-manifold $X$ with an indefinite intersection form, we consider smoothly embedded surfaces in $X \setminus $int$(B^4)$, with boundary a knot $K \subset S^3$. We give several methods to bound the genus of such surfaces in…
Conjecturally, a knot is slice if and only if its positive Whitehead double is slice. We consider an analogue of this conjecture for slice disks in the four-ball: two slice disks of a knot are smoothly isotopic if and only if their positive…