Related papers: Robust 4-manifolds and robust embeddings
It is well-known that all 2-knots are slice. Are all 2-links slice? This is an outstanding open question. In this paper we prove the following: For any 2-component 2-link (J,K)in the 4-sphere which bounds the 5-ball B^5, there is an…
Shake slice generalizes the notion of a slice link, naturally extending the notion of shake slice knots to links. There is also a relative version, shake concordance, that generalizes link concordance. We show that if two links are shake…
We study smooth, proper embeddings of noncompact surfaces in 4-manifolds, focusing on exotic planes and annuli, i.e., embeddings pairwise homeomorphic to the standard embeddings of R^2 and R^2-int D^2 in R^4. We encounter two uncountable…
We compute the group of link homotopy classes of link maps of two 2-spheres into 4-space. It turns out to be free abelian, generated by geometric constructions applied to the Fenn-Rolfsen link map and detected by two self-intersection…
We consider knotted annuli in 4-space, called 2-string-links, which are knotted surfaces in codimension two that are naturally related, via closure operations, to both 2-links and 2-torus links. We classify 2-string-links up to…
Given an acyclic map $X\to Y$ of closed manifolds dimension $d$, we study the relationship between the embeddings of $Y$ in $S^{n}$ with those of $X$ in $S^{n}$ when $n-d \ge 3$. The approach taken here is to first solve the Poincar\'e…
We show that except two special cases, the sphere bundle of a vector bundle over a simply connected $4$-manifold splits after looping. In particular, this implies that though there are infinitely many inequivalent sphere bundles of a given…
We prove that 1) There exist infinitely many non-trivial codimension one "thick" knots in $\mathbb{R}^5$; 2) For each closed four-dimensional smooth manifold $M$ and for each sufficiently small positive $\epsilon$ the set of isometry…
A homotopy 4-ball is a smooth 4-manifold with boundary $S^3$ that is homotopy-equivalent to the standard $B^4$. The smooth 4-dimensional Schoenflies problem asks whether every homotopy 4-ball in $S^4$ (or equivalently $\mathbb{C}^2$) is…
We construct a number of topologically trivial but smoothly non-trivial families of embeddings of 3-manifolds in 4-manifolds. These include embeddings of homology spheres in $S^4$ that are not isotopic but have diffeomorphic complements,…
Using spinning we analyze in a geometric way Haefliger's smoothly knotted (4k-1)-spheres in the 6k-sphere. Consider the 2-torus standardly embedded in the 3-sphere, which is further standardly embedded in the 6-sphere. At each point of the…
Under certain homological hypotheses on a compact 4-manifold, we prove exactness of the topological surgery sequence at the stably smoothable normal invariants. The main examples are the class of finite connected sums of 4-manifolds with…
Some generalizations and variations of the Fintushel-Stern rim surgery are known to produce smoothly knotted surfaces. We show that if the fundamental groups of their complements are cyclic, then these surfaces are topologically unknotted.…
Fixing two concordant links in $3$--space, we study the set of all embedded concordances between them, as knotted annuli in $4$--space. When regarded up to surface-concordance or link-homotopy, the set $\mathcal{C}(L)$ of concordances from…
Every stable 4-sphere is identified with the double branched covering space of a trivial surface-knot space. As a result of Wall, it is known that any two orthogonal bases of every stable 4-sphere are transformed into each other by an…
The unknot U in S^4 has non-unique smooth spanning 3-balls up to isotopy fixing U. Equivalently there are properly embedded non-separating 3-balls in S^1xB^3 not properly isotopic to 1xB^3. More generally there exist non-separating…
We determine loop space decompositions of simply-connected four-manifolds, $(n-1)$-connected $2n$-dimensional manifolds provided $n\notin\{4,8\}$, and connected sums of products of two spheres. These are obtained as special cases of a more…
We introduce a homology surgery problem in dimension 3 which has the property that the vanishing of its algebraic obstruction leads to a canonical class of \pi-algebraically-split links in 3-manifolds with fundamental group \pi . Using this…
M. Freedman showed that every homology 3-sphere embeds as a locally flat submanifold of $S^4$. This is in striking contrast to the state of our knowledge of smooth embeddings of homology spheres. This book surveys what is presently known…
We show that any number of disjointly embedded 2-spheres in 4-space can be pulled apart by a link homotopy, ie, by a motion in which the 2-spheres stay disjoint but are allowed to self-intersect.