Related papers: Pulling Apart 2-spheres in 4-manifolds
One approach to produce a pair of homeomorphic-but-not-diffeomophic closed 4-manifolds is to find a knot which is smoothly slice in one but not the other. This approach has never been run successfully. We give the first examples of a pair…
This is the second in a series of papers. Here we develop here an intersection theory for manifolds equipped with an action of a finite group. As in our previous paper, our approach will be homotopy theoretic, enabling us to circumvent the…
The aim of this article is to introduce invariants of oriented, smooth, closed four-manifolds, built using the Floer homology theories defined in two earlier papers (math.SG/0101206 and math.SG/0105202). This four-dimensional theory also…
Elementary geometric arguments are used to compute the group of homotopy classes of maps from a 4-manifold X to the 3-sphere, and to enumerate the homotopy classes of maps from X to the 2-sphere. The former completes a project initiated by…
The adjunction inequality is a key tool for bounding the genus of smoothly embedded surfaces in 4-manifolds. Using gauge-theoretic invariants, many versions of this inequality have been established for both closed surfaces and surfaces with…
We study smooth maps between smooth manifolds with only fold points as their singularities, and clarify the obstructions to the existence of such a map in a given homotopy class for certain dimensions. The obstructions are described in…
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…
Given two smooth, oriented, closed 4-manifolds $M_1$ and $M_2$, we construct two invariants, $D^P(M_1, M_2)$ and $D(M_1, M_2)$, coming from distances in the pants complex and the dual curve complex respectively. To do this, we adapt work of…
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.…
A standard fact about two incompressible surfaces in an irreducible 3-manifold is that one can move one of them by isotopy so that their intersection becomes $\pi_1$-injective. By extending it on the maps of some 3-dimensional…
In relation to the 4-dimensional smooth Poincar\'e conjecture we construct a tentative invariant of homotopy 4-spheres using embedded contact homology (ECH) and Seiberg-Witten theory (SWF). But for good reason it is a constant value…
We introduce new methods in pseudo-isotopy and embedding space theory. As an application we introduce an invariant that detects nontrivial loops of embedded 2-spheres in $S^{2} \times S^{2}$ and in connected sums of $S^{2} \times S^{2}$.…
We investigate the universal cover of a topological group that is not necessarily connected. Its existence as a topological group is governed by a Taylor cocycle, an obstruction in 3-cohomology. Alternatively, it always exists as a…
These introductory notes on Whitney towers in 4-manifolds, as developed in collaboration with Jim Conant and Peter Teichner, are an expansion of three expository lectures given at the Winter Braids X conference February 2020 in Pisa, Italy.…
The primary goal of this paper is to study topological invariants in two dimensional twofold rotation and time-reversal symmetric spinful systems. In this paper, firstly we build a new homotopy invariant based on the lifting of the Wilson…
This short survey, which was written to accompany a minicourse at the BIRS conference "Topology in dimension 4.5", concerns invariants of knotted $2$-spheres in $S^4$, also known as $2$-knots. It covers invariants extracted from 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…
In the author's earlier work there appeared a new way to specify any smooth closed 4-manifold by a surface diagram, which consists of an orientable surface decorated with simple closed curves. These curves are cyclically indexed, and each…
In this paper we study isotopy classes of closed connected orientable surfaces in the standard $3$-sphere. Such a surface splits the $3$-sphere into two compact connected submanifolds, and by using their Heegaard splittings, we obtain a…
Given an injective amalgam at the level of fundamental groups and a specific 3-manifold, is there a corresponding geometric-topological decomposition of a given 4-manifold, in a stable sense? We find an algebraic-topological splitting…