Related papers: Two Fold Branched Covers
The main result of this paper is that any $3$-dimensional manifold with a finite group action is equivariantly, invertibly homology cobordant to a hyperbolic manifold; this result holds with suitable twisted coefficients as well. The…
In this article, we explore phenomena relating to quasi-alternating surgeries on knots, where a quasi-alternating surgery on a knot is a Dehn surgery yielding the double branched cover of a quasi-alternating link. Since the double branched…
We show that Brieskorn manifolds with their standard contact structures are contact branched coverings of spheres. This covering maps a contact open book decomposition of the Brieskorn manifold onto a Milnor open book of the sphere.
We consider closed orientable 3-dimensional hyperbolic manifolds which are cyclic branched coverings of the 3-sphere, with branching set being a two-bridge knot (or link). We establish two-sided linear bounds depending on the order of the…
We derive a simple closed formula for the SL(2,C) Casson invariant for Seifert fibered homology 3-spheres using the correspondence between SL(2,C) character varieties and moduli spaces of parabolic Higgs bundles of rank two. These results…
Motivated by physical constructions of homological knot invariants, we study their analogs for closed 3-manifolds. We show that fivebrane compactifications provide a universal description of various old and new homological invariants of…
For a large class of 3-manifolds with taut foliations, we construct an action of $\pi_1(M)$ on $\mathbb{R}$ by orientation preserving homeomorphisms which captures the transverse geometry of the leaves. This action is complementary to…
This paper is the second part of our work on 4-dimensional 2-handlebodies. In the first part (arXiv:math.GT/0407032) it is shown that up to certain set of local moves, connected simple coverings of B^4 branched over ribbon surfaces,…
It is shown that any closed three-manifold M obtained by integral surgery on a knot in the three-sphere can always be constructed from integral surgeries on a 3-component link L with each component being an unknot in the three-sphere. It is…
Given a knot K in the three-sphere, we address the question: which Dehn surgeries on K bound negative-definite four-manifolds? We show that the answer depends on a number m(K), which is a smooth concordance invariant. We study the…
We define a general procedure extending surgery to manifolds with foliation or Haefliger structure. We find a single obstruction to foliation surgery along an attaching sphere. When unobstructed, the surgery can be chosen to preserve…
We show that 4-dimensional conjugation manifolds are all obtained from branched 2-fold coverings of knotted surfaces in Z/2-homology 4-spheres.
We prove that octants are cover-decomposable, i.e., any 12-fold covering of any subset of the space with a finite number of translates of a given octant can be decomposed into two coverings. As a corollary, we obtain that any 12-fold…
A multibranched surface is a 2-dimensional polyhedron without vertices. We introduce moves for multibranched surfaces embedded in a 3-manifold, which connect any two multibranched surfaces with the same regular neighborhoods in finitely…
Topological gauge theories in four dimensions which admit surface operators provide a natural framework for realizing homological knot invariants. Every such theory leads to an action of the braid group on branes on the corresponding moduli…
We study simple branched coverings of degree d of the 2- and 3- dimensional sphere branched over oriented links. We demonstrate how to use braid charts to develop embeddings of these into $S^k \times D^2$ for $k=2,3 when $d=2,3$. This is an…
In this paper, we demonstrate that the complete hyperbolic structure of various two-bridge knots and links cannot be deformed to an inequivalent strictly convex projective structure. We also prove a complementary result showing that under…
We investigate the behavior of the SL(2,C) Casson invariant for 3-manifolds obtained by Dehn surgery along two-bridge knots. Using the results of Hatcher and Thurston, and also results of Ohtsuki, we outline how to compute the…
We show that quasi-alternating links arise naturally when considering surgery on a strongly invertible L-space knot (that is, a knot that yields an L-space for some Dehn surgery). In particular, we show that for many known classes of…
We show that any knot which is smoothly the closure of a 3-braid cannot be Lagrangian concordant to and from the maximum Thurston-Bennequin Legendrian unknot except the unknot itself. Our obstruction comes from drawing the Weinstein…