Nonexistence of Stein structures on 4-manifolds and maximal Thurston-Bennequin numbers (Q2358616)

A compact \(4\)-manifold \(X\) with non-empty connected boundary \(\partial X\) 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 \(\partial X\) is contactomorphic to \((M,\xi)\) and is equipped with the contact structure induced by the complex tangencies. A contact structure \(\xi\) on \(M\) is called overtwisted if there is a disk \(D\) embedded in \(M\) such that the tangent plane \(T_xD\) to \(D\) is the same as \(\xi_x\) for every \(x\in\partial D\), otherwise it is called tight. If \(\xi_{\mathrm{std}}\) is the standard tight contact structure in \(S^3\), then a smooth knot \(\mathcal{K}:S^1\to\mathbb R^3\) is Legendrian if \(\mathcal{K}'(t)\in\xi_{\mathrm{std}}\) for all \(t\in S^1\). For a Legendrian knot \(\mathcal{K}\) in \(S^3\), \(\mathrm{tb}(\mathcal{K})\) is the Thurston-Bennequin number of \(\mathcal{K}\). A Legendrian representative of a smooth knot in \(S^3\) is a Legendrian knot smoothly isotopic to the knot. For a smooth knot \(K\) in \(S^3\), the maximal Thurston-Bennequin number \(\overline{\mathrm{tb}}(K)\) of \(K\) is the maximal value of \(\mathrm{tb}(\mathcal{K})\) of a Legendrian representative of \(K\). A framed knot in \(S^3\) is a knot in \(S^3\) equipped with a framing, a smooth family of non-zero vectors perpendicular to the knot. For a \(4\)-manifold represented by a framed knot in \(S^3\), it is 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 the author proves that there exist infinitely many framed knots in \(S^3\) satisfying the following conditions: (i)\, each framed knot represents a \(4\)-manifold which is diffeomorphic to the boundary connected sum of a contractible \(4\)-manifold with Stein fillable boundary \(3\)-manifold and a compact Stein \(4\)-manifold, (ii)\, the framing of each framed knot is not less than the maximal Thurston-Bennequin number of the knot. Moreover, each framed knot can be chosen so that the framing is arbitrarily larger than the maximal Thurston-Bennequin number of the knot.