arXiv research

Exotic diffeomorphism survives stabilizations on a contractible 4-manifold.

Examples are given to show that some compact contractible 4-manifolds can be knotted in the 4-sphere. It is then proved that any finitely presented perfect group with a balanced presentation is a knot group for an embedding of some contractible 4-manifold in the 4-sphere.

4-manifolds can be exotic after connected sum with S^2 x S^2.

There are known infinite families of Brieskorn homology 3-spheres which can be realized as boundaries of smooth contractible 4-manifolds. In this paper we show that free periodic actions on these Brieskorn spheres do not extend smoothly over a contractible 4-manifold. We give a new infinite family of examples in which …

Lickorish has constructed large families of contractible 4--manifolds that have knotted embeddings in the 4--sphere and has also shown that every finitely presented perfect group with balanced presentation occurs as the fundamental group of the complement of a knotted contractible manifold. Here we make a few observati…

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 structure contains a pair of codimension-zero submanifolds homotopy equivalent t…

For a 4-manifold represented by a framed knot in $S^3$, it has been well known that the 4-manifold admits a Stein structure if the framing is less than the maximal Thurston-Bennequin number of the knot. In this paper, we prove either the converse of this fact is false or there exists a compact contractible oriented smo…

New examples of Kirby-Ramanujam spheres found, leading to contractible 4-manifolds.

Paper tackles which 3-spheres bound contractible 4-manifolds or homology 4-balls.

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 paper, we construct infinitely many knotted imbeddings of corks in 4-manifolds such t…

New exotic 4-manifolds found with small trisection genus.

The paper proves trisection genus of Akbulut cork and constructs many corks with trisection genus 3.

For suitable finite groups G, we construct contractible 4-manifolds C with an effective G-action on $\partial C$ whose associated pairs (C,g) for all $g \in G$ are distinct smoothings of the pair $(C,\partial C)$. Indeed C embeds in a 4-manifold so that cutting out C and regluing using distinct elements of G yield dist…

A conjecture due to Gompf asserts that no nontrivial Brieskorn homology sphere admits a pseudoconvex embedding in ${\mathbb C}^2$, with either orientation. A related question asks whether every compact contractible 4-manifold admits the structure of a Stein domain. We verify Gompf's conjecture, with one orientation, fo…

New 4-manifolds with exotic diffeomorphisms found.

We prove that any two smooth h-cobordant simply-connected 4-manifolds can be obtained by taking two manifolds with boundary, one of which is contractible, and gluing them along the boundary via two different attaching maps.

We show that standard cyclic actions on Brieskorn homology 3-spheres with non-empty fixed set do not extend smoothly to any contractible smooth 4-manifold it may bound. The quotient of any such extension would be an acyclic $4$-manifold with boundary a related Brieskorn homology sphere. We briefly discuss well known in…

This is primarily an exposition, combining work of several authors (Curtis, Hsiang, Freedman, Stong, Matveyev, and Bizaca), of the proof that a smooth 5-dimensional h-cobordism between simply connected 4-manifolds is a product off of a contractible piece which itself is diffeomorphic to the 5-ball.

Motivated by a recent paper of Gabai on the Whitehead contractible 3-manifold, we investigate contractible manifolds $M^n$ which decompose or split as $M^n = A \cup_C B$ where $A,B,C \approx \mathbb{R}^n$ or $A,B,C \approx \mathbb{B}^n$. Of particular interest to us is the case $n=4.$ Our main results exhibit large col…

We show that if a compact, oriented 4-manifold admits a coassociative-free immersion into the Euclidean 7-space then its Euler characteristic and signature vanish. Moreover, in the spin case the Gauss map is contractible, so that the immersed manifold is parallelizable. The proof makes use of homotopy theory in particu…

The paper tackles deeply slice knots via immersed curves.

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 boundary diffeomorphism. We then use this result to "separate" finite families of corks…

Study finds topological restrictions on 4-manifolds with uniformly positive scalar curvature.

Surface corks modify 4-manifold structures without changing their homeomorphism type.

This paper improves a result on homology concordance in contractible manifolds and two bridge links.

Suppose that $X,X'$ are simply-connected closed exotic 4-manifolds. It is well-known that $X'$ is obtained by an order 2 cork twist of $X$. We give an infinite exotic family of 4-manifolds not generated by any infinite order cork. This is the first example admitting such a condition. We prove a necessary condition of 4…

The paper constructs contractible manifolds with knotted spheres.

New method uses Khovanov homology to distinguish exotic 4-manifolds.

It is observed that on many 4-manifolds there is a unique smooth structure underlying a globally hyperbolic Lorentz metric. For instance, every contractible smooth 4-manifold admitting a globally hyperbolic Lorentz metric is diffeomorphic to the standard $\R^4$. Similarly, a smooth 4-manifold homeomorphic to the produc…

The study characterizes homology 4-manifolds with $g_2\leq 5$ combinatorially.

Classifies 4-manifolds with elementary amenable groups and their boundaries.

In this paper we find infinitely many Mazur type manifolds and corks with shadow complexity one among the 4-manifolds constructed from contractible special polyhedra having one true vertex by using the notion of Turaev's shadow. We also find such manifolds among 4-manifolds constructed from Bing's house. Our manifolds …

Study exotic Dehn twists in 4-manifolds, producing first known exotic diffeomorphisms.

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 each positive integer $n$, there exists a simply connected closed oriented 4-mani…

We construct a compact, contractible 4-manifold $C$, an infinite-order self-diffeomorphism $f$ of its boundary, and a smooth embedding of $C$ into a closed, simply connected 4-manifold $X$, such that the manifolds obtained by cutting $C$ out of $X$ and regluing it by powers of $f$ are all pairwise nondiffeomorphic. The…

We investigate certain $4$-dimensional analogues of the classical $3$-dimensional Dehn's lemma, giving examples where such analogues do or do not hold, in the smooth and topological categories. In particular, we show that an essential $2$-sphere $S$ in the boundary of a simply connected $4$-manifold $W$ such that $S$ i…

New results on localization of exotic diffeomorphisms in 4-manifolds.

Minimal crystallizations of simply connected PL 4-manifolds are very natural objects. Many of their topological features are reflected in their combinatorial structure which, in addition, is preserved under the connected sum operation. We present a minimal crystallization of the standard PL K3 surface. In combination w…

PL Morse theory proves strong regularity in low dimensions.

The paper presents fundamental groups of complements of shadows in 4-balls.

We show that an infinite family of contractible 4-manifolds have the same boundary as a special type of plumbing. Consequently their Ozsvath--Szabo invariants can be calculated algorithmically. We run this algorithm for the first few members of the family and list the resulting Heegaard--Floer homologies. We also show …

We investigate two specific contractible manifolds (one Stein, and the other non-Stein) whose boundaries have non-trivial mapping class groups. In both cases we show that every diffeomorphism of their boundary extends to a diffeomorphism of the full manifold. In particular, these manifolds cannot be corks. The methods …

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 diffeomorphism obstruction comes from our proof that the knot Floer homology concordance inv…

Geometric trick simplifies link homotopy and concordance.

It is known that there is a unique concordance class in the free homotopy class of $S^1\times pt \subset S^1 \times S^2$. The constructive proof of this fact is given by the second author. It turns out that all the concordances in this construction are invertible. The knots $K\subset S^{1}\times S^{2}$ with hyperbolic …

We construct an infinite order cork (W,f), which means that W is a smooth compact contractible 4-manifold with Stein structure, and f is a self diffeomorphism of the boundary of W, such that the n-fold composition maps f^{n}=f o f o... o f give rise to smoothly distinct corks (W, f^{n}) for sufficiently large values of…

The study proves diffeomorphisms can be localized to simpler submanifolds.

The paper extends Einstein condition to 4-manifolds using Hodge splittings.