Overtwisted Disks and Exotic Symplectic Structures

Abstract

The symplectization of an overtwisted contact structure in Euclidean 3--space is shown to be an exotic symplectic structure on Euclidean 4--space. The technique can be extended to produce exotic symplectic structures in higher dimensional Euclidean spaces using a GPS--structure and applies to symplectizations of appropriate open contact manifolds.