Related papers: Milnor Invariants and Twisted Whitney Towers

We show how to measure the failure of the Whitney trick in dimension 4 by constructing higher- order intersection invariants of Whitney towers built from iterated Whitney disks on immersed surfaces in 4-manifolds. For Whitney towers on…

This paper computes Whitney tower filtrations of classical links. Whitney towers consist of iterated stages of Whitney disks and allow a tree-valued intersection theory, showing that the associated graded quotients of the filtration are…

The first part of this paper completes the classification of Whitney towers in the 4-ball that was started in three related papers. We provide an algebraic framework allowing the computations of the graded groups associated to geometric…

The first part of this paper exposits a simple geometric description of the Kirby-Siebenmann invariant of a 4--manifold in terms of a quadratic refinement of its intersection form. This is the first in a sequence of higher-order…

We show that for each $k\in\mathbb{N}$, a link $L\subset S^3$ bounds a degree $k$ Whitney tower in the 4-ball if and only if it is \emph{$C_k$-concordant} to the unlink. This means that $L$ is obtained from the unlink by a finite sequence…

We present complete classifications of links in the 3-sphere modulo framed and twisted Whitney towers in a rational homology 4-ball. This provides a geometric characterization of the vanishing of the Milnor invariants of links in terms of…

An obstruction theory for representing homotopy classes of surfaces in 4-manifolds by immersions with pairwise disjoint images is developed, using the theory of non-repeating Whitney towers. The accompanying higher-order intersection…

We relate certain abelian invariants of a knot, namely the Alexander polynomial, the Blanchfield form, and the Arf invariant, to intersection data of a Whitney tower in the 4-ball bounded by the knot. We also give a new 3-dimensional…

We show that Tim Cochran's invariants $\beta^i(L)$ of a $2$-component link $L$ in the $3$--sphere can be computed as intersection invariants of certain 2-complexes in the $4$--ball with boundary $L$. These 2-complexes are special types of…

We continue to develop an obstruction theory for embedding 2-spheres into 4-manifolds in terms of Whitney towers. The proposed intersection invariants take values in certain graded abelian groups generated by labelled trivalent trees, and…

A geometric characterization of the Arf invariant of a knot in the 3-sphere is given in terms of two kinds of 4-dimensional bordisms, half-gropes and Whitney towers. These types of bordisms have associated complexities class and order which…

This paper describes grope and Whitney tower filtrations on the set of concordance classes of classical links in terms of class and order respectively. Using the tree-valued intersection theory of Whitney towers, the associated graded…

We construct many examples of non-slice knots in 3-space that cannot be distinguished from slice knots by previously known invariants. Using Whitney towers in place of embedded disks, we define a geometric filtration of the 3-dimensional…

The twisted torsion of a 3-manifold is well-known to be zero whenever the corresponding twisted Alexander module is non-torsion. Under mild extra assumptions we introduce a new twisted torsion invariant which is always non-zero. We show how…

We generalize Milnor link invariants to all types of surface-links in $4$--space (possibly with boundary). This is achieved by using the notion of cut-diagram, which is a 2-dimensional generalization of Gauss diagrams, associated to…

This is the beginning of an obstruction theory for deciding whether a map f:S^2 --> X^4 is homotopic to a topologically flat embedding, in the presence of fundamental group and in the absence of dual spheres. The first obstruction is Wall's…

Milnor's invariants are some of the more fundamental oriented link concordance invariants; they behave as higher order linking numbers and can be computed using combinatorial group theory (due to Milnor), Massey products (due to Turaev and…

We consider Milnor invariants for certain covering links as a generalization of covering linkage invariants formulated by R. Hartley and K. Murasugi. A set of Milnor invariants for covering links is a cobordism invariant of a link, and that…

Knots and links in 3-manifolds are studied by applying intersection invariants to singular concordances. The resulting link invariants generalize the Arf invariant, the mod 2 Sato-Levine invariants, and Milnor's triple linking numbers.…

For a classical link, Milnor defined a family of isotopy invariants, called Milnor $\overline{\mu}$-invariants. Recently, Chrisman extended Milnor $\overline{\mu}$-invariants to welded links by a topological approach. The aim of this paper…