Related papers: Splitting the spectral flow and the SU(3) Casson i…
Splitting invariants describe how a plane curve "splits" by the pull-back under a Galois cover over the projective plane whose branch locus contains no component of the plane curve. They enable us to distinguish the embedded topology of…
We study hyperplane sections of smooth polarized $K3$-surfaces that split into unions of lines. We describe the dual adjacency graphs of such sections and find sharp upper bounds on their number. In most cases (starting from degree $6$), we…
A knot in the 3-sphere is called doubly slice if it is a slice of an unknotted 2-sphere in the 4-sphere. We give a bi-sequence of new obstructions for a knot being doubly slice. We construct it following the idea of Cochran-Orr-Teichner's…
We show that there exist infinitely many pairs of non-homeomorphic closed oriented SOL torus bundles with the same quantum (TQFT) invariants. This follows from the arithmetic behind the conjugacy problem in $SL(2,\Z)$ and its congruence…
We derive a simple closed formula for the SL(2,C) Casson invariant for Seifert fibered homology 3-spheres using the correspondence between SL(2,C) character varieties and moduli spaces of parabolic Higgs bundles of rank two. These results…
This paper contains an attempt to formulate rigorously and to check predictions in enumerative geometry of curves following from Mirror Symmetry. The main tool is a new notion of stable map. We give an outline of a contsruction of…
We give examples of a linear combination of algebraic knots and their mirrors that are algebraically slice, but whose topological and smooth four-genus is two. Our examples generalize an example of non-slice algebraically slice linear…
We study the equivariant 4-genus of strongly invertible knots in the $S^3$ boundary of 4-manifolds with involution. We provide techniques for constructing slice disks for knots in various symmetric 4-manifolds via an equivariant version of…
Knots and links in 3-manifolds are studied by applying intersection invariants to singular concordances. The resulting link invariants generalize the Arf invariant, the mod 2 Sato-Levine invariants, and Milnor's triple linking numbers.…
In this paper, we identify low-dimensional models for dense core subsets in the space of $3\times 3$ high-contrast optical flow patches sampled from the Sintel dataset. In particular, we leverage the theory of approximate and discrete…
A formula is given in terms of secondary characteristic classes for the leading order contribution to the spectral flow for a path of twisted Dirac operators on an odd dimensional, Riemannian manifold when the twisting is done by a path of…
Using the duality between Wilson loop expectation values of SU(N) Chern-Simons theory on $S^3$ and topological open-string amplitudes on the local mirror of the resolved conifold, we study knots on $S^3$ and their invariants encoded in…
In view of the self-linking invariant, the number $|K|$ of framed knots in $S^3$ with given underlying knot $K$ is infinite. In fact, the second author previously defined affine self-linking invariants and used them to show that $|K|$ is…
We prove Simon's conjecture for 3-manifolds.
We consider open, oriented 3-manifolds which are infinite connected sums of closed 3-manifolds. We introduce some topological invariants for these manifolds and obtain a classification in the case where there are only finitely many summands…
A method to obtain explicit and complete topological solution of SU(2) Chern-Simons theory on $S^3$ is developed. To this effect the necessary aspects of the theory of coloured-oriented braids and duality properties of conformal blocks for…
We make a precision test of a recently proposed conjecture relating Chern-Simons gauge theory to topological string theory on the resolution of the conifold. First, we develop a systematic procedure to extract string amplitudes from vacuum…
We describe a simple way of constructing torus fibrations $T^3\to X\to S^3$ which degenerate canonically over a knot or link in $S^3$. We show that the topological invariants of $X$ can be computed algebraically from the monodromy…
Extending Haken's Theorem to product annuli and disks for Heegaard splittings of sutured manifolds, we show that the handle number of an irreducible sutured manifold equals the handle number of its guts. We further show that reduced sutured…
Recently, Mullins calculated the Casson-Walker invariant of the 2-fold cyclic branched cover of an oriented link in S^3 in terms of its Jones polynomial and its signature, under the assumption that the 2-fold branched cover is a rational…