English

Bar-Natan skein lasagna modules and exotic surfaces in 4-manifolds

Geometric Topology 2025-05-13 v2

Abstract

We construct and study the skein lasagna module obtained by importing the Bar-Natan Khovanov homology package. For 4-manifolds satisfying a non-vanishing condition, we produce pairs of exotic surfaces (with boundary) by using the behavior of skein lasagna gluing maps associated to connect sums of 4-manifolds. We show that one internal stabilization is generally not enough for these exotic knotted surfaces, generalizing results of Hayden to 4-manifolds that contain homologically diverse surfaces admitting primitive fillings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.03968,
  title  = {Bar-Natan skein lasagna modules and exotic surfaces in 4-manifolds},
  author = {Ian A. Sullivan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.03968},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

19 pages, 4 figures, added references, fixed typos, expanded section 4