Related papers: A note on knot surgery
We show that given a 3-manifold $Y$ there is only a finite number of alternating knots $K \subset S^3$ such that $Y$ can be obtained by surgery on $K$. A very similar but somewhat not complete statement has been obtained in a recent…
A Seifert surgery is an integral surgery on a knot in S^3 producing a Seifert fiber space which may contain an exceptional fiber of index 0. The Seifert Surgery Network is a 1-dimensional complex whose vertices correspond to Seifert…
Four observations compose the main results of this note. The first records the existence of a smoothly embedded 2-sphere $S$ inside $\mathbb{R} P^2\times S^2$ such that performing a Gluck twist on $S$ produces a manifold $Y$ that is…
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…
This article presents a new and more elementary proof of the main Seiberg-Witten-based obstruction to the existence of Einstein metrics on smooth compact 4-manifolds. It also introduces a new smooth manifold invariant which conveniently…
For any knot $K$ in $S^3$ and any positive rational $r$, we show that smooth $(-r)$-surgery on $K$ always admits a tight contact structure. More specifically, the tightness is detected by the non-vanishing Heegaard Floer contact invariant.
We give a method for constructing many pairs of distinct knots $K_0$ and $K_1$ such that the two 4-manifolds obtained by attaching a 2-handle to $B^4$ along $K_i$ with framing zero are diffeomorphic. We use the d-invariants of Heegaard…
We give two infinite families of examples of closed, orientable, irreducible 3-manifolds $M$ such that $b_1(M)=1$ and $\pi_1(M)$ has weight 1, but $M$ is not the result of Dehn surgery along a knot in the 3-sphere. This answers a question…
Two Dehn surgeries on a knot are called cosmetic if they yield homeomorphic manifolds. For a null-homologous knot with certain conditions on the Thurston norm of the ambient manifold, if the knot admits cosmetic surgeries, then the surgery…
One can define the complexity of a smooth 4-manifold as the minimal sum of the number of disks, strands and crossings in a Kirby diagram. Martelli proved that the number of homeomorphism classes of complexity less than n grows as $n^2$. In…
From a handlebody-theoretic perspective, the simplest compact, contractible 4-manifolds, other than the 4-ball, are Mazur manifolds. We produce the first pairs of Mazur manifolds that are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic. Our…
This paper employs knot invariants and results from hyperbolic geometry to develop a practical procedure for checking the cosmetic surgery conjecture on any given one-cusped manifold. This procedure has been used to establish the following…
A pair of surgeries on a knot is called purely cosmetic if the pair of resulting 3-manifolds are homeomorphic as oriented manifolds. Using recent work of Hanselman, we show that (nontrivial) knots which arise as the closure of a 3-stranded…
Surgery, as developed by Browder, Kervaire, Milnor, Novikov, Sullivan, Wall and others is a method for comparing homotopy types of topological spaces with diffeomorphism or homeomorphism types of manifolds of dimension >= 5. In this paper,…
We introduce a surgery for generalized complex manifolds whose input is a symplectic 4-manifold containing a symplectic 2-torus with trivial normal bundle and whose output is a 4-manifold endowed with a generalized complex structure…
We show that there exist infinitely many pairs of distinct knots in the 3-sphere such that each pair can yield homeomorphic lens spaces by the same Dehn surgery. Moreover, each knot of the pair can be chosen to be a torus knot, a satellite…
Even though the disk embedding theorem is not available in dimension 4 for free fundamental groups, some surgery problems may be shown to have topological solutions. We prove that surgery problems may be solved if one considers closed…
By considering non-orientable surfaces in the surgered manifolds, we show that the 10/3- and -10/3-Dehn surgeries on the 2-bridge knot $9_{27} = S(49,19)$ are not cosmetic, i.e., they give mutually non-homeomorphic manifolds. The knot is…
We consider the cosmetic surgery problem for two-bridge knots in the 3-sphere. It is seen that all the two-bridge knots at most 9 crossings other than $9_{27} = S(49,19)=C[2,2,-2,2,2,-2]$ admits no purely cosmetic surgery pairs. Then we…
Distinct knots K, K' can sometimes share a common p/q-framed Dehn surgery. A folk conjecture held that for a fixed pair of knots, this can occur for at most one value of p/q. We disprove this conjecture by constructing pairs of distinct…