Related papers: Counterexamples to Kauffman's Conjectures on Slice…
In this paper, we formulate a construction of ideal coset invariants for surface-links in $4$-space using invariants for knots and links in $3$-space. We apply the construction to the Kauffman bracket polynomial invariant and obtain an…
We formulate a very general conjecture relating the analytical invariants of a normal surface singularity to the Seiberg-Witten invariants of its link provided that the link is a rational homology sphere. As supporting evidence, we…
We describe a procedure for creating infinite families of hyperbolic knots having unique minimal genus Seifert surface. A large subset of these knots have the further property that the surface cannot be the sole compact leaf of a depth one…
We prove that every closed oriented smooth 4-manifold X admits a broken Lefschetz fibration (aka singular Lefschetz fibration) over the 2-sphere. Given any closed orientable surface F of square zero in X, we can choose the fibration so that…
Roberts proved that a family of alternating, arborescent, prime knots each have at least $2^{2n-1}$ distinct minimal genus Seifert surfaces, where $n$ is the genus of the knot in question. We give a subfamily of these knots that have…
We consider the question: "If the zero-framed surgeries on two oriented knots in the 3-sphere are integral homology cobordant, preserving the homology class of the positive meridians, are the knots themselves concordant?" We show that this…
We address primary decomposition conjectures for knot concordance groups, which predict direct sum decompositions into primary parts. We show that the smooth concordance group of topologically slice knots has a large subgroup for which the…
Lens spaces are the only 3-manifolds that admit gradient-like flows with four fixed points. This is an immediate corollary of Morse inequality and of the Morse function with four critical points existence. A similar question for…
It is known that the minimal degree of the Jones polynomial of a positive knot is equal to its genus, and the minimal coefficient is 1. We extend this result to almost positive links and partly identify the 3 following coefficients for…
We give a necessary and sufficient condition for a simple closed curve on the boundary of a genus two handlebody to decompose the handlebody into (torus with one boundary component times [0,1]. We use this condition to decide whether a…
Milnor's $\bar{\mu}$-invariants of links in the $3$-sphere $S^3$ vanish on any link concordant to a boundary link. In particular, they are trivial on any knot in $S^3$. Here we consider knots in thickened surfaces $\Sigma \times [0,1]$,…
In this paper we study embeddings of oriented connected closed surfaces in $\mathbb S^3$. We define a complete invariant, the fundamental span, for such embeddings, generalizing the notion of the peripheral system of a knot group. From the…
We prove that there exist infinitely many topologically slice knots which cannot bound a smooth null-homologous disk in any definite 4-manifold. Furthermore, we show that we can take such knots so that they are linearly independent in the…
A knot in $S^3$ is topologically slice if it bounds a locally flat disk in $B^4$. A knot in $S^3$ is rationally slice if it bounds a smooth disk in a rational homology ball. We prove that the smooth concordance group of topologically and…
It is shown that every knot or link is the set of complex tangents of a 3-sphere smoothly embedded in the three-dimensional complex space. We show in fact that a one-dimensional submanifold of a closed orientable 3-manifold can be realised…
A link at the origin of an isolated singularity of a two-dimensional semialgebraic surface in $\mathbb{R}^4$ is a topological knot (or link) in $S^3$. We study the connection between the ambient Lipschitz geometry of semialgebraic surface…
A crucial step in the surgery-theoretic program to classify smooth manifolds is that of representing a middle--dimensional homology class by a smoothly embedded sphere. This step fails even for the simple 4-manifolds obtained from the…
Rationally null-homologous links in Seifert fibered spaces may be represented combinatorially via labeled diagrams. We introduce an additional condition on a labeled link diagram and prove that it is equivalent to the existence of a…
We obtain new lower bounds of the minimal genus of a locally flat surface representing a 2-dimensional homology class in a topological 4-manifold with boundary, using the von Neumann-Cheeger-Gromov $\rho$-invariant. As an application our…
Under a simple assumption on Seifert surfaces, we characterise knots whose stable topological 4-genus coincides with the genus.