Related papers: On 4-Manifolds, Folds and Cusps

We give a short proof of a conjecture of Stipsicz on the minimality of fiber sums of Lefschetz fibrations, which was proved earlier by Usher. We then construct the first examples of genus g > 1 Lefschetz fibrations on minimal symplectic…

Singular fibrations generalize achiral Lefschetz fibrations of 4-manifolds over surfaces while sharing some of their properties. For instance, relatively minimal singular fibrations are determined by their monodromy. We explain how to…

This paper continues the study of decompositions of a smooth 4-manifold into two handlebodies with handles of index $\leq2$. Part I gave existence results in terms of spines and chain complexes over the fundamental group of the ambient…

This article presents the constructions of new infinite families of smooth 4-manifolds with the property that any two manifolds in the same family are homeomorphic and, from their construction, seem to be quite different, but cannot be…

The broken genera are orientation preserving diffeomorphism invariants of closed oriented 4-manifolds, defined via broken Lefschetz fibrations. We study the properties of the broken genera invariants, and calculate them for various…

We consider structures analogous to symplectic Lefschetz pencils in the context of a closed 4-manifold equipped with a `near-symplectic' structure (ie, a closed 2-form which is symplectic outside a union of circles where it vanishes…

We show that simple coverings of B^4 branched over ribbon surfaces up to certain local ribbon moves bijectively represent orientable 4-dimensional 2-handlebodies up to handle sliding and addition/deletion of cancelling handles. As a…

We present a few general results on foliations of 4-manifolds by surfaces: existence, tautness, relations to minimal genus of embedded surfaces; as well as some open problems. We hope to stimulate interest in this area.

We establish constraints on the topology of smooth Lefschetz fibrations with $4$-dimensional fibers, by studying the family Bauer-Furuta invariant. To compute this invariant, we analyze the framed bordism class of 1-dimensional…

An R_2-move is a homotopy of wrinkled fibrations which deforms images of indefinite fold singularities like Reidemeister move of type II. Variants of this move are contained in several important deformations of wrinkled fibrations, flip and…

We introduce multisections of smooth, closed 4-manifolds, which generalize trisections to decompositions with more than three pieces. This decomposition describes an arbitrary smooth, closed 4-manifold as a sequence of cut systems on a…

We show that hyperelliptic symplectic Lefschetz fibrations are symplectically birational to two-fold covers of rational ruled surfaces, branched in a symplectically embedded surface. This reduces the classification of genus 2 fibrations to…

Motivated by M. Scharlemann and A. Thompson's definition of thin position of 3-manifolds, we define the width of a handle decomposition a 4-manifold and introduce the notion of thin position of a compact smooth 4-manifold. We determine all…

Let M be a smooth 4-manifold which admits a relatively minimal hyperelliptic genus h Lefschetz fibration over the 2-sphere. If all of the vanishing cycles for this fibration are nonseparating curves, then we show that M is a 2-fold cover of…

We show that isotopy classes of simple closed curves in any oriented surface admit a quandle structure with operations induced by Dehn twists, the Dehn quandle of the surface. We further show that the monodromy of a Lefschetz fibration can…

We prove that every closed oriented smooth 4-manifold X admits a broken Lefschetz fibration (aka singular Lefschetz fibration) over the 2-sphere. Given any closed orientable surface F of square zero in X, we can choose the fibration so that…

In this paper we classify symplectic Lefschetz fibrations (with empty base locus) on a four-manifold which is the product of a three-manifold with a circle. This result provides further evidence in support of the following conjecture…

We provide local formul{\ae} for Poisson bivectors and symplectic forms on the leaves of Poisson structures associated to wrinkled fibrations on smooth $4$--manifolds.

Given some type of fibration on a 4-manifold $X$ with a torus regular fiber $T$, we may produce a new 4-manifold $X_T$ by performing torus surgery on $T$. There is a natural way to extend the fibration to $X_T$, but a multiple fiber…

We introduce the $2$-nodal spherical deformation of certain singular fibers of genus $2$ fibrations, and use such deformations to construct various examples of simply connected minimal symplectic $4$-manifolds with small topology. More…