Related papers: Morse theory for manifolds with boundary

In this paper we introduce Morse Lie groupoid morphisms and study their main properties. We show that this notion is Morita invariant which gives rise to a well defined notion of Morse function on differentiable stacks. We show a groupoid…

The main result is that an s-cobordism (topological or smooth) of 4-manifolds has a product structure outside a ``core'' sub s-cobordism. These cores are arranged to have quite a bit of structure, for example they are smooth and abstractly…

Let $Y\subseteq \mathbb{R}^n$ be a closed definable subset and $X\subseteq \mathbb{R}^n$ be a smooth manifold. We construct a version of Morse theory for the restriction to $X$ of the Euclidean distance function from $Y$. This is done using…

We prove a centre manifold theorem for a map along a manifold-with-boundary of fixed points, and provide an application to the study of gradient descent with large step size on two-layer matrix factorisation problems.

We call a Morse function $f$ on a closed manifold $k$-constrained if neither $f$ nor $-f$ has critical points of indefinite Morse index $< k$. In this paper we study bordism groups of $k$-constrained Morse functions, and thus interpolate…

M-theory can be defined on closed manifolds as well as on manifolds with boundary. As an extension, we show that manifolds with corners appear naturally in M-theory. We illustrate this with four situations: The lift to bounding twelve…

In this note, we give a proof of the famous theorem of M. Morse dealing with the cancellation of a pair of non-degenerate critical points of a smooth function. Our proof consists of a reduction to the one-dimensional case where the question…

Round handles are affiliated with smooth 4-manifolds in two major ways: 5-dimensional round handles appear extensively as the building blocks in cobordisms between 4-manifolds, whereas 4-dimensional round handles are the building blocks of…

In this thesis, we present various contributions to the study of free boundary minimal surfaces. After introducing some basic tools and discussing some delicate aspects related to the definition of Morse index when allowing for a contact…

This paper begins the study of Morse theory for orbifolds, or more precisely for differentiable Deligne-Mumford stacks. The main result is an analogue of the Morse inequalities that relates the orbifold Betti numbers of an almost-complex…

Given a set of simplifying moves on 3-manifolds, we apply them to a given 3-manifold M as long as possible. What we get is a root of M. For us, it makes sense to consider three types of moves: compressions along 2-spheres, proper discs and…

We describe an extension of Morse theory to smooth functions on compact Riemannian manifolds, without any nondegeneracy assumptions except that the critical locus must have only finitely many connected components.

From the topological viewpoint, Morse shellings of finite simplicial complexes are {\it pinched} handle decompositions and extend the classical shellings. We prove that every discrete Morse function on a finite simplicial complex induces…

The questions when two Morse function on closed manifolds are conjugated is investigated. Using the handle decompositions of manifolds the condition of conjugation is formulated. For each Morse function on 3-manifold the ordered generalized…

Static manifolds with boundary were recently introduced to mathematics. This kind of manifold appears naturally in the prescribed scalar curvature problem on manifolds with boundary when the mean curvature of the boundary is also…

We prove that there are homology three-spheres that bound definite four-manifolds, but any such bounding four-manifold must be built out of many handles. The argument uses the homology cobordism invariant $\Gamma$ from instanton Floer…

We study connected components of the Morse boundary and their stabilisers. We introduce the notion of point-convergence and show that if the set of non-singleton connected components of the Morse boundary of a finitely generated group $G$…

For each integer q>0 there is a cohomology theory such that the zero cohomology group of a manifold N of dimension n is a certain group of cobordism classes of proper fold maps of manifolds of dimension n+q into N. We prove a splitting…

Topology change is considered to be a necessary feature of quantum gravity by some authors, and impossible by others. One of the main arguments against it is that spacetimes with changing spatial topology have bad causal properties. Borde…

We develop functoriality for Morse theory, namely, to a pair of Morse-Smale systems and a generic smooth map between the underlying manifolds we associate a chain map between the corresponding Morse complexes, which descends to the correct…