Related papers: Pulling Apart 2-spheres in 4-manifolds

We describe a procedure to construct infinite sets of pairwise smoothly inequivalent 2-spheres in simply connected 4-manifolds, which are topologically isotopic and whose complement has a prescribed fundamental group that satisfies some…

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…

An invariant of orientable 3-manifolds is defined by taking the minimum $n$ such that a given 3-manifold embeds in the connected sum of $n$ copies of $S^2 \times S^2$, and we call this $n$ the embedding number of the 3-manifold. We give…

A trisection of a smooth, closed, oriented 4-manifold is a decomposition into three 4-dimensional 1-handlebodies meeting pairwise in 3-dimensional 1-handlebodies, with triple intersection a closed surface. The fundamental groups of the…

We develop the theory of the diagrammatics of surface cross sections to prove that there are an infinite number of homology 3-spheres smoothly embeddable in a homology 4-sphere but not in a homotopy 4-sphere. Our primary obstruction comes…

Let $M$ be a smooth, orientable, closed, connected $4$-manifold and suppose that $H_1(M;\mathbb{Z})$ is finitely generated and has no $2$-torsion. We give a homotopy decomposition of the suspension of $M$ in terms of spheres, Moore spaces…

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…

The notion of a Bing cell is introduced, and it is used to define invariants, link groups, of 4-manifolds. Bing cells combine some features of both surfaces and 4-dimensional handlebodies, and the link group \lambda(M) measures certain…

We calculate the Seiberg-Witten invariants of branched covers of prime degree, where the branch locus consists of embedded spheres. Aside from the formula itself, our calculations give rise to some new constraints on configurations of…

The goal of this book is to characterize algebraically the closed 4-manifolds that fibre nontrivially or admit geometries in the sense of Thurston, or which are obtained by surgery on 2-knots, and to provide a reference for the topology of…

Given a link map f into a manifold of the form Q = N \times \Bbb R, when can it be deformed to an unlinked position (in some sense, e.g. where its components map to disjoint \Bbb R-levels) ? Using the language of normal bordism theory as…

We introduce new obstructions to topological knot concordance. These are obtained from amenable groups in Strebel's class, possibly with torsion, using a recently suggested $L^2$-theoretic method due to Orr and the author. Concerning…

We study closed, connected, spin 4-manifolds up to stabilisation by connected sums with copies of $S^2 \times S^2$. For a fixed fundamental group, there are primary, secondary and tertiary obstructions, which together with the signature…

Geometric Complexity Theory as initiated by Mulmuley and Sohoni in two papers (SIAM J Comput 2001, 2008) aims to separate algebraic complexity classes via representation theoretic multiplicities in coordinate rings of specific group…

We introduce the (general) homotopy groups of spheres as link invariants for Brunnian-type links through the investigations on the intersection subgroup of the normal closures of the meridians of strongly nonsplittable links. The homotopy…

We use surgery along 2-tori embedded in a union of two copies of a product of punctured 2-tori to produce a new collection of homotopy 4-spheres (4-manifolds homotopy equivalent to $S^4$ and hence homeomorphic to $S^4$ but possibly not…

The polynomial invariants $q_d$ for a large class of smooth 4-manifolds are shown to satisfy universal relations. The relations reflect the possible genera of embedded surfaces in the 4-manifold and lead to a structure theorem for the…

Let $S_0$ and $S_1$ be two homotopic, oriented 2-spheres embedded in an orientable 4-manifold $X$. After discussing several operations for modifying an immersion of a 3-manifold into a 5-manifold, we discuss the Freedman--Quinn (fq) and…

David Gabai recently proved a smooth 4-dimensional "Light Bulb Theorem" in the absence of 2-torsion in the fundamental group. We extend his result to 4-manifolds with arbitrary fundamental group by showing that an invariant of Mike Freedman…