New curiosities in the menagerie of corks

Abstract

A cork is a smooth, contractible, oriented, compact 4-manifold $W$ together with a self-diffeomorphism $f$ of the boundary 3-manifold that cannot extend to a self-diffeomorphism of $W$; the cork is said to be strong if $f$ cannot extend to a self-diffeomorphism of any smooth integer homology ball bounded by $\partial W$. Surprising recent work of Dai, Hedden, and Mallick showed that most of the well-known corks in the literature are strong. We construct the first non-strong corks, which also give rise to new examples of absolutely exotic Mazur manifolds. Additionally we give the first examples of corks where the diffeomorphism of $\partial W$ can be taken to be orientation-reversing.