Related papers: Corks, Plugs and exotic structures
Living materials such as membranes, cytoskeletal assemblies, cell collectives and tissues can often be described as active solids -- materials that are energized from within, with elastic response about a well defined reference…
We establish a conjecture of Mumford characterizing rationally connected complex projective manifolds in several cases.
We produce examples of pairwise non-diffeomorphic closed irreducible 4-manifolds with non-trivial free abelian fundamental group of rank less than three and small Euler characteristic. These exotic smooth structures become standard after…
In this paper we find infinitely many Mazur type manifolds and corks with shadow complexity one among the 4-manifolds constructed from contractible special polyhedra having one true vertex by using the notion of Turaev's shadow. We also…
We introduce and investigate a natural family of metrics on connected components of a rack. The metrics are closely related to certain bi-invariant metrics on the group of inner automorphisms of the rack. We also introduce a bounded…
We show that on an arbitrary collection of objects there is a wide variety of higher order architectures governed by hyperstructures. Higher order gluing, local to global processes, fusion of collections, bridges and higher order types are…
Finite-order invariants of knots in arbitrary 3-manifolds (including non-orientable ones) are constructed and studied by methods of the topology of discriminant sets. Obstructions to the integrability of admissible weight systems to…
We generalise the well-known ``embroidery'' envelopes of chords joining points at angles $t$ and $mt$ of a single circle in several ways. Firstly we allow $m$ to be rational (possibly negative) instead of integral, finding formulas for the…
The problem of possible astrophysical consequences of the existence of exotic differential structures on manifolds is discussed. It is argued that corrections to the curvature of the form of a source like terms should be expected in the…
Knots and links are fascinating and intricate topological objects. Their influence spans from DNA and molecular chemistry to vortices in superfluid helium, defects in liquid crystals and cosmic strings in the early universe. Here, we find…
Whitehead doubles provide a plethora of examples of knots that are topologically slice but not smoothly slice. We discuss the problem of the Whitehead double of the Figure 8 knot and survey commonly used techniques to obstructing sliceness.…
We review some aspects of theories with compact extra dimensions. We consider the motivation and the theoretical basis of Large, Universal and Warped Extra Dimensions. We focus on those aspects that are potentially relevant in the…
An important class of contact 3--manifolds are those that arise as links of rational surface singularities with reduced fundamental cycle. We explicitly describe symplectic caps (concave fillings) of such contact 3--manifolds. As an…
We show that there is a complex structure on the symplectic 4-manifold $W_{4, k}$ obtained from the elliptic surface E(4) by rationally blowing down $k$ sections for $2\le k\le 9$. And we interpret it via ${\mathbb Q}$-Gorenstein smoothing.…
Given a real analytic function $f$ from $\mathbb{R}^4$ to $\mathbb{R}^2$ with isolated critical point at the origin, the link $L_f$ of the singularity is a real fibred knot in $\mathbb{S}^{3}$. From this singularities, we construct a family…
A 4-manifold is constructed with some curious metric properties; or maybe it is many 4-manifolds masquerading as one, which would explain why it looks curious. Anyway, knots in the 3-sphere with complete finite volume hyperbolic metrics on…
Very compact objects probe extreme gravitational fields and may be the key to understand outstanding puzzles in fundamental physics. These include the nature of dark matter, the fate of spacetime singularities, or the loss of unitarity in…
We explore the scale-dependence and correlations of jet substructure observables to improve upon existing techniques in the identification of highly Lorentz-boosted objects. Modified observables are designed to remove correlations from…
The main result is that an s-cobordism (topological or smooth) of 4-manifolds has a product structure outside a ``core'' sub s-cobordism. These cores are arranged to have quite a bit of structure, for example they are smooth and abstractly…
It is well known that for any exotic pair of simply connected closed oriented 4-manifolds, one is obtained from the other by twisting a compact contractible submanifold via an involution on the boundary. By contrast, here we show that for…