Cork twisting exotic Stein 4-manifolds (Q360058)

A cork is a contractible, compact, smooth \(4\)-manifold with an involution on the boundary that does not extend smoothly to the entire manifold. The first cork discovered had a handle decomposition with one \(1\)-handle and one \(2\)-handle [the first author, J. Differ. Geom. 33, No.2, 335--356 (1991; Zbl 0839.57015)]. In this paper Akbulut and Yasui introduce a family of operations on \(2\)-handlebodies that creates a copy of this cork in the handlebody. They use Stein structures and the adjunction inequality to show that the result of regluing the cork via the involution produces a different differential structure. Using this they prove that every \(2\)-handlebody admits infinitely many distinct smooth structures. They also prove an analogous result for exotic embeddings of codimension zero submanifolds.