Related papers: Symmetric Whitney tower cobordism for bordered 3-m…
In this paper, we prove a conjecture of Friedl and Powell that their Casson-Gordon type invariant of 2-component link with linking number one is actually an obstruction to being height 3.5 Whitney tower/grope concordant to the Hopf Link.…
We obtain new invariants of topological link concordance and homology cobordism of 3-manifolds from Hirzebruch-type intersection form defects of towers of iterated p-covers. Our invariants can extract geometric information from an arbitrary…
Many open problems and important theorems in low-dimensional topology have been formulated as statements about certain 2--complexes called gropes. This paper describes a precise correspondence between embedded gropes in 4--manifolds and the…
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…
In a groundbreaking work A. Levine proved the surprising result that there exist knots in homology spheres which are not smoothly concordant to any knot in $S^3$, even if one allows for concordances in homology cobordisms. Since then…
We use topological surgery in dimension four to give sufficient conditions for the zero framed surgery manifold of a 3-component link to be homology cobordant to the 3-torus, which arises from zero framed surgery on the Borromean rings, via…
We introduce a geometric operation, which we call the relative Whitney trick, that removes a single double point between properly immersed surfaces in a $4$-manifold with boundary. Using the relative Whitney trick we prove that every link…
This paper extends some results of Hatcher and Quinn beyond the metastable range. We give a bordism theoretic obstruction to deforming a map between manifolds simultaneously off of a collection of pairwise disjoint submanifolds under the…
Relative self-linking and linking "numbers" for pairs of knots in oriented 3-manifolds are defined in terms of intersection invariants of immersed surfaces in 4-manifolds. The resulting concordance invariants generalize the usual…
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 develop a version of Seiberg--Witten Floer cohomology/homotopy type for a spin$^c$ 4-manifold with boundary and with an involution which reverses the spin$^c$ structure, as well as a version of Floer cohomology/homotopy type for oriented…
A cobordism between links in thickened surfaces consists of a surface $ S $ and a $3$-manifold $M $, with $ S $ properly embedded in $ M \times I $. We show that there exist links in thickened surfaces such that if $(S,M) $ is a cobordism…
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 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…
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…
This paper continues our exploration of homology cobordism of 3-manifolds using our recent results on Cheeger-Gromov rho-invariants associated to amenable representations. We introduce a new type of torsion in 3-manifold groups we call…
This work continues the study of a homotopy-theoretic construction of the author inspired by the Bott-Taubes integrals. Bott and Taubes constructed knot invariants by integrating differential forms along the fiber of a bundle over the space…
We explain the notion of a grope cobordism between two knots in a 3-manifold. Each grope cobordism has a type that can be described by a rooted unitrivalent tree. By filtering these trees in different ways, we show how the Goussarov-Habiro…
It is known that every closed oriented 3-manifold is homology cobordant to a hyperbolic 3-manifold. By contrast we show that many homology cobordism classes contain no Seifert fibered 3-manifold. This is accomplished by determining the…
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.…