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TLDR I want to see more examples of exotic $4$-manifold (hopefully connected, simply connected, oriented, and closed).

Are there known presentations of $4$-manifolds $M$ with exotic structures, whether in terms of Kirby linky data, PL-triangulations, or any other constructions? There are a few given in Akbulut's book [1], but they are $4$-manifolds with boundaries.

Mainly, I am looking for those $M$ that are oriented, connected, simply-connected and closed. But really, any pointers to any example with exotic smooth structures are appreciated.

[1] 4-Manifolds - Selman Akbulut

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    $\begingroup$ Mainly using gauge theoretic invariants one can detect such 4-manifolds ( Akbulut's book is great source). In my best knowledge, knot surgery, rational blow down and cork-twists are possibly only known techniques to obtain something exotic. If you search those key words in google, you may find more sources to read. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 14, 2021 at 3:58
  • $\begingroup$ BTW I still found your question a little confusing. What exactly do you want to know? $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 14, 2021 at 4:48
  • $\begingroup$ I believe the answer to the OP's question is "yes". But the question is fairly non-specific. 4-manifolds with "exotic" structures exist, so certainly they are presented in various ways, by various sources. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 14, 2021 at 8:02
  • $\begingroup$ @AnubhavMukherjee I want to see more examples of exotic $4$-manifolds.. sorry my original post is mouthful. $\endgroup$
    – Student
    Commented Nov 14, 2021 at 11:13
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    $\begingroup$ @Student yup, research on "exotic" 4-manifold topology is an wide open field. You may find some lecture notes where some examples are compiled together. (I cannot think of one top off my head right now.) $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 15, 2021 at 1:09

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I guess that this is as explicit and low-tech as it gets: if $X$ is a K3 surface (i.e. a non-singular quartic hypersurface in $\mathbb{CP}^3$, with the complex orientation), then $X \# \overline{\mathbb{CP}}{}^2$ and $3\mathbb{CP}^2 \# 20\overline{\mathbb{CP}}{}^2$ are an exotic pair.

To see that they are homeomorphic, we use that odd indefinite forms are diagonalisable and then Freedman's theorem. (Ok, and that complex projective hypersurfaces are simply-connected, by Lefschetz's theorem.) To see that they are not diffeomorphic, we use that Kähler surfaces have (some) non-zero Seiberg–Witten invariant, while anything written as a connected sum of indefinite pieces doesn't. (In particular, the same argument applies to any hypersurface of $\mathbb{CP}^3$ of degree at least 4; in this case, blowing up/connected summing with $\overline{\mathbb{CP}}{}^2$ is only needed in even degrees.)

This is just the tip of the iceberg of the tip of the iceberg that Anubhav mentioned in his comment.

EDIT (06/03/2024): Levine, Lidman, and Piccirillo's paper [LLP] fits the bill. They give explicit constructions of exotic 4-manifolds using Kirby diagrams (and explicitly computing some Heegaard Floer diffeomorphism invariants).

While I'm at it with the edits... About the example I mentioned above: one can give explicit handle diagrams for the K3 and for its exotic companion (see Gompf and Stipsicz's book), so those examples where explicit too. There's an important difference with [LLP]: the original computation of the SW invariants of the K3 and of $3\mathbb{CP}^2 \# 20\overline{\mathbb{CP}}{}^2$ was done using properties of SW (an something similar with HF), while in [LLP] they compute the invariants from the handle decomposition.

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If you're still interested in this, I've been working on triangulations of exotic 4-manifolds for some time now. I've implemented an algorithm to produce triangulations of 4-manifolds from Kirby diagrams, and using this I've obtained triangulations of some bounded exotic pairs. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15087 for the details and data --- again note that the exotic pairs I've constructed triangulations of are those you may already be aware of and have boundary (in the linked paper, I cone all boundaries to a point, but in forthcoming work I look at ones with 'real' boundary). The long term goal/big picture idea here, among others, is that by doing all this combinatorially/computationally, then eventually we might be able to generate (triangulations of) new exotica at our pleasure.

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  • $\begingroup$ So good to see you paper. I will read it in details. Do you also have code that implements your algorithm? How heuristic is the heuristics you provided? Will you implement them in near future? $\endgroup$
    – Student
    Commented Mar 6 at 11:48
  • $\begingroup$ The utility for triangulating framed links (2-handles only) is available in the latest version of Regina; the code for the "expanded" algorithm for Kirby diagrams with 1-handles isn't available publicly yet (but should be out soonish). There is a link to the code for the simplification heuristic in the paper (currently this requires knowledge of building against the Regina libraries, but again should become built-in functionality soon). The simplification heuristic is just that - a heuristic, but as it turns out, a fairly effective one :) Happy to answer any other questions if you have them $\endgroup$
    – rab
    Commented Mar 7 at 12:15

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