Related papers: Monodromy Substitutions and Rational Blowdowns

We explicitly construct genus-2 Lefschetz fibrations whose total spaces are minimal symplectic 4-manifolds homeomorphic to complex rational surfaces CP^2 # p (-CP^2) for p=7, 8, 9, and to 3 CP^2 #q (-CP^2) for q =12,...,19. Complementarily,…

These are notes from lectures given at the Clay Institute Summer School on "Floer homology, gauge theory and low-dimensional topology" (Budapest, 2004). The first part describes as background some of the geometry of symplectic fibre bundles…

This paper investigates the exotic phenomena exhibited by links of disconnected surfaces with boundary that are properly embedded in the 4-ball. Our main results provide two different constructions of exotic pairs of surface links that are…

The topology of broken Lefschetz fibrations is studied by means of handle decompositions. We consider a slight generalization of round handles, and describe the handle diagrams for all that appear in dimension four. We establish simplified…

We consider two families of planar self-similar tilings of different nature: the tilings consisting of translated copies of the fractal sets defined by an iterated function system, and the tilings obtained as a geometrical realization of a…

We study the exchange of stability in scalar reaction-diffusion equations which feature a slow passage through transcritical and pitchfork type singularities in the reaction term, using a novel adaptation of the geometric blow-up method.…

This paper is a survey of the authors' recent results on "abc-surfaces" and the monodromy of their natural Lefschetz fibrations and projections to P^1 x P^1, see (arXiv:0910.2142). The results being surveyed explore various fundamental…

This is a considerably expanded version of the "pure" part of our 2002 preprint. We define a category of pure birational motives over a field, depending on the choice of an adequate equivalence relation on algebraic cycles. It is obtained…

Let $W$ be a nonorientable $4$-dimensional handlebody without $3$- and $4$-handles. We show that $W$ admits a Lefschetz fibration over the $2$-disk, whose regular fiber is a nonorientable surface with nonempty boundary. This is an analogue…

We prove similar theorems concerning the structure of bundles involving complements of fiber-type hyperplane arrangements and orbit configuration spaces. These results facilitate analysis of the fundamental groups of these spaces, which may…

We establish curious Lefschetz property for generic character varieties of Riemann surfaces conjectured by Hausel, Letellier and Rodriguez-Villegas. Our main tool applies directly in the case when there is at least one puncture where the…

Boring is an operation which converts a knot or two-component link in a 3--manifold into another knot or two-component link. It generalizes rational tangle replacement and can be described as a type of 2--handle attachment. Sutured manifold…

We study the monodromy diffeomorphism of Milnor fibrations of isolated complex surface singularities, by computing the family Seiberg--Witten invariant of Seifert-fibered Dehn twists using recent advances in monopole Floer homology. More…

Bidouble covers $\pi : S \mapsto Q$ of the quadric Q are parametrized by connected families depending on four positive integers a,b,c,d. In the special case where b=d we call them abc-surfaces. Such a Galois covering $\pi$ admits a small…

We introduce an idea of constructing Lefschetz fibrations of Weinstein manifolds from Weinstein handle decompositions on them. We prove theorems that formulate the idea for the cases of cotangent bundles and some plumbings. As a corollary,…

We identify multirole logic as a new form of logic in which conjunction/disjunction is interpreted as an ultrafilter on the power set of some underlying set (of roles) and the notion of negation is generalized to endomorphisms on this…

The Frobenius manifold structure on the space of rational functions with multiple simple poles is constructed. In particular, the dependence of the Saito-flat coordinates on the flat coordinates of the intersection form is studied. While…

It is known that for coprime integers $p>q\geq 1$, the lens space $L(p^2,pq-1)$ bounds a rational ball, $B_{p,q}$, arising as the 2-fold branched cover of a (smooth) slice disk in $B^4$ bounding the associated 2-bridge knot. Lekilli and…

We study some symplectic geometric aspects of rationally connected 4-folds. As a corollary, we prove that any smooth projective 4-fold symplectic deformation equivalent to a Fano 4-fold of pseudo-index at least 2 or a rationally connected…

We use the techniques of "algebraic Killing spinors" to obtain a family of holographic flow solutions with four supersymmetries in M-theory. The family of supersymmetric backgrounds constructed here includes the non-trivial flow to the…