Related papers: Codimension 2 embeddings, algebraic surgery and Se…

Let S be a compact connected oriented surface, whose boundary is connected or empty. A homology cylinder over the surface S is a cobordism between S and itself, homologically equivalent to the cylinder over S. The Y-filtration on the monoid…

We consider isometric immersions of complete connected Riemannian manifolds into space forms of nonzero constant curvature. We prove that if such an immersion is compact and has semi-definite second fundamental form, then it is an embedding…

For a commutative Frobenius algebra $A$, we construct a $(2,3,3+\varepsilon)$-dimensional TQFT $\mathsf{AFK}_A$ that assigns to a 3-manifold a skein module of embedded $A$-decorated surfaces. These surface skein modules have been first…

When can a map between manifolds be deformed away from itself? We describe a (normal bordism) obstruction which is often computable and in general much stronger than the classical primary obstruction in cohomology. In particular, it answers…

We introduce the notion of alteration of a surface embedded in a 3-manifold extending that of compression. We see that given two Seifert surfaces of the same link are related to each other by ``single'' alteration, even if they are not by…

We prove that $S^1$ is a unimodular, cocommutative Hopf algebra in the category $CW^{1+1}$ of 2-equivalence classes of cobordisms of 2-dimensional CW-complexes and that $CW^{1+1}$ is actually equivalent to the symmetric monoidal category…

The purpose of this article is to produce effective versions of some rigidity results in algebra and geometry. On the geometric side, we focus on the spectrum of primitive geodesic lengths (resp., complex lengths) for arithmetic hyperbolic…

The inclusion of the unit in a braided tensor category $\mathcal{V}$ induces a 1-morphism in the Morita 4-category of braided tensor categories $BrTens$. We give criteria for the dualizability of this morphism. When $\mathcal{V}$ is a…

In recent years, a close connection between supergravity, string effective actions and generalized geometry has been discovered that typically involves a doubling of geometric structures. We investigate this relation from the point of view…

We prove a surface embedding theorem for 4-manifolds with good fundamental group in the presence of dual spheres, with no restriction on the normal bundles. The new obstruction is a Kervaire-Milnor invariant for surfaces and we give a…

To study coisotropic reduction in the context of deformation quantization we introduce constraint manifolds and constraint algebras as the basic objects encoding the additional information needed to define a reduction. General properties of…

We construct geometric examples of pseudomanifolds that satisfy the Witt condition for intersection homology Poincare duality with respect to certain fields but not others. We also compute the bordism theory of $K$-Witt spaces for an…

We recall Petit's construction of "dichromatic" invariants of 4-manifolds computed from Kirby diagrams using a nested pair of ribbon fusion categories $ B \subset C $ as initial data. Along the way we prove a lemma that fits the use of…

We develop the details of a surgery theory for contact manifolds of arbitrary dimension via convex structures, extending the 3-dimensional theory developed by Giroux. The theory is analogous to that of Weinstein manifolds in symplectic…

Using the $ku$- and $BP$-theoretic versions of Astey's cobordism obstruction for the existence of smooth Euclidean embeddings of stably almost complex manifolds, we prove that, for $e$ greater than or equal to $\alpha(n)$--the number of…

It is known that spin cobordism can be determined by Stiefel-Whitney numbers and index theory invariants, namely $KO$-theoretic Pontryagin numbers. In this paper, we show that string cobordism at dimension 24 can be determined by elliptic…

We extract a nonnegative integer-valued invariant, which we call the "order of algebraic torsion", from the Symplectic Field Theory of a closed contact manifold, and show that its finiteness gives obstructions to the existence of symplectic…

The purpose of this article is to show that the bivariant algebraic $A$-cobordism groups considered previously by the author are independent of the chosen base ring $A$. This result is proven by analyzing the bivariant ideal generated by…

We construct examples in any odd dimension of contact manifolds with finite and non-zero algebraic torsion (in the sense of Latschev-Wendl), which are therefore tight and do not admit strong symplectic fillings. We prove that Giroux torsion…

Generalizing our ideas in [arXiv:1006.3313], we explain how topologically-twisted N=2 gauge theory on a four-manifold with boundary, will allow us to furnish purely physical proofs of (i) the Atiyah-Floer conjecture, (ii) Munoz's theorem…