English

Cubiquitous Lattices and Branched Covers bounding rational balls

Geometric Topology 2026-03-30 v2

Abstract

Greene and Owens explore cubiquitous lattices as an obstruction to rational homology 3-spheres bounding rational homology 4-balls. The purpose of this article is to better understand which sublattices of Zn\mathbb{Z}^n are cubiquitous with the aim of effectively using their cubiquity obstruction. We develop a geometric obstruction (called the Wu obstruction) to cubiquity and use it as tool to completely classify which sublattices with orthogonal bases are cubiquitous. We then apply this result the double branched covers of alternating connected sums of torus links. Finally, we explore how the Wu obstruction can be used in conjunction with contractions to obstruct the cubiquity of infinite families of lattices.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.00500,
  title  = {Cubiquitous Lattices and Branched Covers bounding rational balls},
  author = {Erica Choi and Nur Saglam and Jonathan Simone and Katerina Stuopis and Hugo Zhou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.00500},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

v2: various typos corrected and a gap in the original proof fixed. To appear in Knot Theory and its Ramifications