Lefschetz fibrations and exotic symplectic structures on cotangent bundles of spheres

Abstract

We construct open symplectic manifolds which are convex at infinity ("Liouville manifolds") and which are diffeomorphic, but not symplectically isomorphic, to cotangent bundles T^*S^{n+1}, for any n+1 \geq 3. These manifolds are constructed as total spaces of Lefschetz fibrations, where the fibre and all but one of the vanishing cycles are fixed. We show that almost any choice of the last vanishing cycle leads to a nonstandard symplectic structure (those choices which yield standard T^*S^{n+1} can be exactly determined). The Corrigendum changes the statement and proof of Lemma 1.1 in the original paper, which corrects our original description of the diffeomorphism type of the manifolds. We also fill a gap in the original proof of Lemma 1.2.