Exotic open 4-manifolds which are nonleaves (Q1637310)

The authors study the possibility of realizing exotic smooth structures on finitely punctured simply connected closed 4-manifolds as leaves of a codimension-one foliation on a compact manifold. The main results of the paper and some historical remarks are given in the introduction. The main results of the paper are: 1) No manifold \(Y\in{\mathcal Y}\) is diffeomorphic to any leaf of a \(C^2\) codimension-one foliation of a compact manifold. The class \({\mathcal Y}\) consists of smooth open manifolds (up to diffeomorphism) whose underlying topological manifolds are obtained by removing a finite nonzero number of points from a closed, connected, simply connected topological 4-manifold. 2) If there exists a leaf diffeomorphic to \(Y\in{\mathcal Y}\) in a \(C^{1,0}\) codimension-one foliation of a closed 5-manifold, then it is a proper leaf and each connected component of the union of the leaves diffeomorphic to \(Y\) fibers over the circle with the leaves as fibers. Section 1 contains a construction of uncountably many exotic structures in \({\mathbb{R}}^4\), which are nonperiodic [\textit{C. H. Taubes}, J. Differ. Geom. 25, 363--430 (1987; Zbl 0615.57009)]. A better control of these structures is provided by the invariant defined by \textit{L. R. Taylor} [Asian J. Math. 12, No. 3, 285--288 (2008; Zbl 1170.57024)]. In Section 2, the authors define certain exotic simply connected smooth manifolds that cannot be diffeomorphic to leaves of a \(C^2\) codimension-one foliation in a compact smooth manifold; then they prove the main results. In particular, they show the existence of uncountably many smooth open 4-manifolds which are not diffeomorphic to any leaf of a codimension-one \(C^2\)-foliation on a compact manifold. Examples include some exotic manifolds in \({\mathbb{R}}^4\) and exotic cylinders \({\mathbb{S}}^3 \times {\mathbb{R}}\). In Section 3 the authors formulate a conjecture: no open 4-manifold with an isolated Taubes-like end is diffeomorphic to a leaf of a \(C^{1,0}\) foliation of arbitrary codimension in a compact manifold.