Related papers: Twisted Alexander polynomials and fibered 3-manifo…
A classical result in knot theory says that the Alexander polynomial of a fibered knot is monic and that its degree equals twice the genus of the knot. This result has been generalized by various authors to twisted Alexander polynomials and…
Let N be a closed, oriented 3-manifold. A folklore conjecture states that S^1 x N admits a symplectic structure only if N admits a fibration over the circle. The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence to this conjecture studying…
Let N be a closed, oriented 3-manifold. A folklore conjecture states that $S^{1} \times N$ admits a symplectic structure if and only if $N$ admits a fibration over the circle. We will prove this conjecture in the case when N is irreducible…
In this paper we show that given any 3-manifold N and any non-fibered class in H^1(N;Z) there exists a representation such that the corresponding twisted Alexander polynomial is zero. This is obtained by extending earlier work of the…
Let M be a 4-manifold which admits a free circle action. We use twisted Alexander polynomials to study the existence of symplectic structures and the minimal complexity of surfaces in M. The results on the existence of symplectic structures…
In this paper we use twisted Alexander polynomials to prove that the exterior of a particular graph knot is not fibered. Then we build three 2-component graph links out of this knot, and use similar techniques to discuss their fiberedness.
For a fibered knot in the 3-sphere the twisted Alexander polynomial associated to an SL(2,C)-character is known to be monic. It is conjectured that for a nonfibered knot there is a curve component of the SL(2,C)-character variety containing…
We introduce a new algebraic topological technique to detect non-fibred knots in the three sphere using the twisted Alexander invariants. As an application, we show that for any Seifert matrix of a knot with a nontrivial Alexander…
Using recent results of Agol, Przytycki-Wise and Wise we show that twisted Alexander polynomials detect the Thurston norm of any irreducible 3-manifold which is not a closed graph manifold.
It is known that the Alexander polynomial detects fibered knots and 3-manifolds that fiber over the circle. In this note, we show that when the Alexander polynomial becomes inconclusive, the notion of "knot adjacency", studied in the paper…
As a generalization of a classical result on the Alexander polynomial for fibered knots, we show in this paper that the Reidemeister torsion associated to a certain representation detects fiberedness of knots in the three sphere.
Let $Y_-$ and $Y_+$ be two compact 3-manifolds with empty or toroidal boundary. A 4-dimensional ribbon homology cobordism is a homologically trivial cobordism built with 1-handles and 2-handles. In this note, following the work of Friedl…
In this paper we show that the twisted Alexander polynomial associated to a parabolic representation determines fiberedness and genus of a wide class of 2-bridge knots. As a corollary we give an affirmative answer to a conjecture of…
We show that if the fundamental group of the complement of a rationally homologically fibered knot in a rational homology 3-sphere is bi-orderable, then its Alexander polynomial has at least one positive real root. Our argument can be…
We study a twisted Alexander polynomial naturally associated to a hyperbolic knot in an integer homology 3-sphere via a lift of the holonomy representation to SL(2, C). It is an unambiguous symmetric Laurent polynomial whose coefficients…
If phi: G-->G' is a surjective homomorphism, we prove that the twisted Alexander polynomial of G is divisible by the twisted Alexander polynomial of G'. As an application, we show non-existence of surjective homomorphism between certain…
It follows from earlier work of Silver-Williams and the authors that twisted Alexander polynomials detect the unknot and the Hopf link. We now show that twisted Alexander polynomials also detect the trefoil and the figure-8 knot, that…
We mostly determine which closed smooth oriented 4-manifolds fibering over lower dimensional manifolds are virtually symplectic, i.e. finitely covered by symplectic 4-manifolds.
Let L be an oriented (d+1)-component link in the 3-sphere, and let L(q) be the d-component link in a homology 3-sphere that results from performing 1/q-surgery on the last component. Results about the Alexander polynomial and twisted…
We provide the twisted Alexander polynomials of finite abelian covers over three-dimensional manifolds whose boundary is a finite union of tori. This is a generalization of a well-known formula for the usual Alexander polynomial of knots in…