Contact 5-manifolds and smooth structures on Stein 4-manifolds

We show that, under a certain condition, contact 5-manifolds can `coarsely' distinguish smooth structures on compact Stein 4-manifolds via contact open books. We also give a simple sufficient condition for an infinite family of Stein 4-manifolds to have an infinite subfamily of pairwise non-diffeomorphic Stein 4-manifolds. The proofs rely on the adjunction inequality. We remark that there are various examples of infinitely many pairwise exotic Stein 4-manifolds whose smooth structures can be distinguished by these results.

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