English

Surface slices and homology spheres

Geometric Topology 2026-01-16 v3

Abstract

We develop the theory of the diagrammatics of surface cross sections to prove that there are an infinite number of homology 3-spheres smoothly embeddable in a homology 4-sphere but not in a homotopy 4-sphere. Our primary obstruction comes from work of Taubes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2202.02696,
  title  = {Surface slices and homology spheres},
  author = {Clayton McDonald},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.02696},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

13 pages, 10 figures, clarity improved, an extra hyperbolic geometry argument added at the end to prove that the infinite family of manifolds I produce has infinitely many distinct manifolds in it

R2 v1 2026-06-24T09:22:15.151Z