Related papers: Handlebody argument for modifying achiral Lefschet…

The purpose of this note is to show that classical cobordism arguments, which go back to the pioneering works of Mandelbaum and Moishezon, provide quick and unified proofs of any knot surgered compact simply-connected 4-manifold X_K…

We find a characterization for Fano 4-folds $X$ with Lefschetz defect $\delta_{X}=3$: besides the product of two del Pezzo surfaces, they correspond to varieties admitting a conic bundle structure $f\colon X\to Y$ with…

We study a symplectic surgery operation we call unchaining, which effectively reduces the second Betti number and the symplectic Kodaira dimension at the same time. Using unchaining, we give novel constructions of symplectic Calabi-Yau…

We study the existence of incompressible embeddings of surfaces into the genus two handlebody. We show that for every compact surface with boundary, orientable or not, there is an incompressible embedding of the surface into the genus two…

This is a survey on known results and open problems about closed aspherical manifolds, i.e., connected closed manifolds whose universal coverings are contractible. Many examples come from certain kinds of non-positive curvature conditions.…

A handlebody-knot is a handlebody embedded in the 3-sphere. We establish a uniform method to construct invariants for handlebody-links. We introduce the category $\mathcal{T}$ of handlebody-tangles and present it by generators and…

This is primarily an exposition, combining work of several authors (Curtis, Hsiang, Freedman, Stong, Matveyev, and Bizaca), of the proof that a smooth 5-dimensional h-cobordism between simply connected 4-manifolds is a product off of a…

We show that a variety of monodromy phenomena arising in geometric topology and algebraic geometry are most conveniently described in terms of quandle homomorphisms from a knot quandle associated to the base to a quandle associated to a…

We study certain types of piecewise smooth Lagrangian fibrations of smooth symplectic manifolds, which we call stitched Lagrangian fibrations. We extend the classical theory of action-angle coordinates to these fibrations by encoding the…

In this paper, we introduce the notions of an iterated planar Lefschetz fibration and an iterated planar open book decomposition and prove the Weinstein conjecture for contact manifolds supporting an open book that has iterated planar…

This re-certifying paper describes the details of the Morse homology of manifolds with boundary, introduced by the author before, in terms of handlebody decompositions.

We prove that any genus-2 Lefschetz fibration without reducible fibers and with ``transitive monodromy'' is holomorphic. The latter condition comprises all cases where the number of singular fibers is not congruent to 0 modulo 40. An…

This paper gives a proof that the fundamental group of a class of closed orientable 3-manifolds constructed from three injective handlebodies has a solvable word problem. This is done by giving an algorithm to decide if a closed curve in…

A multisection of a 4-manifold is a decomposition into 1-handlebodies intersecting pairwise along 3-dimensional handlebodies or along a central closed surface; this generalizes the Gay-Kirby trisections. We show how to compute the twisted…

The paper considers the uniqueness question of factorization of a knotted handlebody in the $3$-sphere along decomposing $2$-spheres. We obtain a uniqueness result for factorization along decomposing $2$-spheres meeting the handlebody at…

We use symplectic cohomology to study the non-uniqueness of symplectic structures on the smooth manifolds underlying affine varieties. Starting with a Lefschetz fibration on such a variety and a finite set of primes, the main new tool is a…

We provide a complete set of two moves that suffice to relate any two open book decompositions of a given 3-manifold. One of the moves is the usual plumbing with a positive or negative Hopf band, while the other one is a special local…

Given a Heegaard splitting of a closed 3-manifold, the skein modules of the two handlebodies are modules over the skein algebra of their common boundary surface. The zeroth Hochschild homology of the skein algebra of a surface with…

In this paper we construct six-dimensional compact non-K\"ahler Hamiltonian circle manifolds which satisfy the strong Lefschetz property themselves but nevertheless have a non-Lefschetz symplectic quotient. This provides the first known…

We prove that adjoint orbits of semisimple Lie algebras have the structure of symplectic Lefschetz fibrations. We then describe the topology of the regular and singular fibres, in particular calculating their middle Betti numbers. For the…