Related papers: Representing Dehn twists with branched coverings

Many three dimensional manifolds are two-fold branched covers of the three dimensional sphere. However, there are some that are not. This paper includes exposition about two-fold branched covers and many examples. It shows that there are…

When a Dehn filled link manifold contains a geometrically incompressible one-sided surface, it is shown there is a unique boundary incompressible position that the surface can take in the link space. The proof uses a version of the…

We prove that a variety of examples of minimal complex surfaces admit exotic diffeomorphisms, providing the first known instances of exotic diffeomorphisms of irreducible 4-manifolds. We also give sufficient conditions for the boundary Dehn…

Let $S$ and $X$ be two connected topological surfaces without boundary, and assume that $S$ is either of infinite type or has negative Euler characteristic. In this paper, we prove that if $p:S\rightarrow X$ is a fully ramified branched…

We address the problem of existence and uniqueness of a factorization of a given element of the modular group into a product of two Dehn twists. As a geometric application, we conclude that any maximal real elliptic Lefschetz fibration is…

We prove that any finitely presented group can be realized as the fundamental group of a spin Lefschetz fibration over the 2-sphere. We moreover show that any admissible lattice point in the symplectic geography plane below the Noether line…

In this note we find new relations in the mapping class group of a genus two surface with n boundary components for n=1,..., 8 which induce a genus two Lefschetz fibration $CP^2#13CP^2bar \to S^2$ with n disjoint sections. As a consequence,…

We give a finite presentation of the mapping class group of an oriented (possibly bounded) surface of genus greater or equal than 1, considering Dehn twists on a very simple set of curves.

Kronheimer-Mrowka shows that the Dehn twist along a $3$-sphere in the neck of two $K3$ surfaces is not smoothly isotopic to the identity. Their result requires that the manifolds are simply connected and the signature of one of them is $16…

We prove that any symplectic 4-manifold which is not a rational or ruled surface, after sufficiently many blow-ups, admits an arbitrary number of nonisomorphic Lefschetz fibrations of the same genus which cannot be obtained from one another…

The first aim of this paper is to give four types of examples of surface bundles over surfaces with non-zero signature. The first example is with base genus 2, a prescribed signature, a 0-section and the fiber genus greater than a certain…

We give a bound for the exponents of powers of Dehn twists to generate a right-angled Artin group. Precisely, if $\mathcal{F}$ is a finite collection of pairwise distinct simple closed curves on a finite type surface and if $N$ denotes the…

We argue that for a smooth surface S, considered as a ramified cover over the projective plane branched over a nodal-cuspidal curve B one could use the structure of the fundamental group of the complement of the branch curve to understand…

We generalize the idea of unknotting knots to Seifert surfaces. We define an operation called ribbon twist which serves as the equivalent of a crossing change for knots. A Seifert surface is considered untwisted, the equivalent to…

We show that every closed connected non-orientable PL $4$-manifold $X$ is a simple branched covering of $\RP^4$. We also show that $X$ is a simple branched covering of the twisted $S^3$-bundle $S^1 \simtimes S^3$ if and only if the first…

Here we prove that up to diffeomorphism every compact Stein manifold W of dimension 2n+2>4 admits a Lefschetz fibration over the two-disk with Stein regular fibers, such that the monodromy of the fibration is a symplectomorphism induced by…

We prove that every closed oriented smooth 4-manifold X admits a broken Lefschetz fibration (aka singular Lefschetz fibration) over the 2-sphere. Given any closed orientable surface F of square zero in X, we can choose the fibration so that…

The well-known fact that any genus $g$ symplectic Lefschetz fibration $ X^{4}\to S^{2}$ is given by a word that is equal to the identity element in the mapping class group and each of whose elements is given by a positive Dehn twist,…

We provide new branched covering representations for bounded and/or non-compact 4-manifolds, which extend the known ones for closed 4-manifolds. Assuming $M$ to be a connected oriented PL 4-manifold, our main results are the following: (1)…

In this paper, we give some relations in the mapping class groups of oriented closed surfaces in the form that a product of a small number of right hand Dehn twists is equal to a single commutator. Consequently, we find upper bounds for the…