Exotic Stein fillings with arbitrary fundamental group (Q1663784)

A \(4\)-manifold \(X\) is said to be a Stein filling of a closed contact \(3\)-manifold \((M, \xi)\) if \(X\) is the sub-level set of a plurisubharmonic function on a Stein surface and the contact structure induced on \(\partial X\) by complex tangencies is contactomorphic to \((M, \xi)\). Two Stein fillings are said to be exotic if they are homeomorphic but non-diffeomorphic. A group \(G\) is said to be finitely presentable if it possesses a presentation \(\langle x_1,\dots,x_k\mid r_1,\dots,r_s\rangle\) with finitely many generators, and finitely many relations. In [J. Differ. Geom. 53, No. 2, 205--236 (1999; Zbl 1040.53094)], \textit{S. K. Donaldson} proved that every closed symplectic 4-manifold admits a Lefschetz pencil over \(S^2\) and \textit{R. E. Gompf} in [Ann. Math. (2) 142, No. 3, 527--595 (1995; Zbl 0849.53027)] showed that every finitely presentable group \(G\) can be realized as the fundamental group of some closed symplectic 4-manifold. In this paper, the authors prove that for any finitely presentable group \(G\) there exists an infinite family of homeomorphic but pairwise non-diffeomorphic (exotic) symplectic but non-complex closed 4-manifolds with fundamental group \(G\) such that each member of this family admits a Lefschetz fibration of the same genus over \(S^2\). Also, they show that for any finitely presentable group \(G\) there exists a contact 3-manifold \(M\) which admits infinitely many homeomorphic but pairwise non-diffeomorphic Stein fillings such that the fundamental group of each filling is isomorphic to \(G\). Moreover, it is shown that the contact 3-manifold \(M\) is contactomorphic to the link of some isolated complex surface singularity equipped with its canonical contact structure \(\xi_{\text{sd}}\).