Exotic R4
In mathematics, an exotic R4 is a differentiable manifold that is homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to the Euclidean space R4. The first examples were found in 1982 by Michael Freedman and others, by using the contrast between Freedman's theorems about topological 4-manifolds, and Simon Donaldson's theorems about smooth 4-manifolds. There is a continuum of non-diffeomorphic differentiable structures of R4, as was shown first by Clifford Taubes.
Prior to this construction, non-diffeomorphic smooth structures on spheres — exotic spheres — were already known to exist, although the question of the existence of such structures for the particular case of the 4-sphere remained open (and still remains open as of 2014). For any positive integer n other than 4, there are no exotic smooth structures on Rn; in other words, if n ≠ 4 then any smooth manifold homeomorphic to Rn is diffeomorphic to Rn.
An exotic R4 is called small if it can be smoothly embedded as an open subset of the standard R4.
Small exotic R4s can be constructed by starting with a non-trivial smooth 5-dimensional h-cobordism (which exists by Donaldson's proof that the h-cobordism theorem fails in this dimension) and using Freedman's theorem that the topological h-cobordism theorem holds in this dimension.
An exotic R4 is called large if it cannot be smoothly embedded as an open subset of the standard R4.
Examples of large exotic R4s can be constructed using the fact that compact 4-manifolds can often be split as a topological sum (by Freedman's work), but cannot be split as a smooth sum (by Donaldson's work).
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