Related papers: Engel relations in 4-manifold topology
This paper investigates the exotic phenomena exhibited by links of disconnected surfaces with boundary that are properly embedded in the 4-ball. Our main results provide two different constructions of exotic pairs of surface links that are…
In this article we apply the technique of Luttinger surgery to study the complexity of the fundamental group of symplectic $4$-manifolds with holomorphic Euler number $\chi_h=1$. We discuss the topology of symplectic $4$-manifolds with…
Suppose that $C=(C_1,..., C_m)$ is a configuration of 2-dimensional symplectic submanifolds in a symplectic 4-manifold $(X,\omega)$ with connected, negative definite intersection graph $\Gamma_C$. We show that by replacing an appropriate…
We apply Donaldson's theorem on the intersection forms of definite 4--manifolds to characterize the lens spaces which smoothly bound rational homology 4--dimensional balls. Our result implies, in particular, that every smoothly slice…
For any given finitely presented group G there exists a closed oriented 4-manifold with fundamental group G. What pairs of integers can occur as the signature and Euler characteristic of such a 4-manifold? The first part of this paper…
M-theory can be defined on closed manifolds as well as on manifolds with boundary. As an extension, we show that manifolds with corners appear naturally in M-theory. We illustrate this with four situations: The lift to bounding twelve…
We apply results from both contact topology and exceptional surgery theory to study when Legendrian surgery on a knot yields a reducible manifold. As an application, we show that a reducible surgery on a non-cabled positive knot of genus g…
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…
Guided by consideration of problems in 2 and 3 dimensional lattice model computation, we are led to define a number of new categories, and functors between these categories and the partition category, culminating in the introduction of two…
In the present work, we realize the space of 2-string links $\mathcal{L}$ as a free algebra over a colored operad denoted $\mathcal{SCL}$ (for "Swiss-Cheese for links"). This result extends works of Burke and Koytcheff about the quotient of…
Duality groups of Abelian gauge theories on four manifolds and their reduction to two dimensions are considered. The duality groups include elements that relate different space-times in addition to relating different gauge-coupling…
Recent investigation of locality problem for higher-spin fields led to a vertex reconstruction procedure that involved elements of contraction of the original Vasiliev interaction algebra. Inspired by these results we propose the…
The validity of Freedman's disk theorem is known to depend only on the fundamental group. It was conjectured that it fails for nonabelian free fundamental groups. If this were true then surgery theory would work in dimension four. Recently,…
A continuous cohomology theory for topological quandles is introduced, and compared to the algebraic theories. Extensions of topological quandles are studied with respect to continuous 2-cocycles, and used to show the differences in second…
By a result of Kedra and Pinsonnault, we know that the topology of groups of symplectomorphisms of symplectic 4-manifolds is complicated in general. However, in all known (very specific) examples, the rational cohomology rings of…
We introduce hyperelliptic simplified (more generally, directed) broken Lefschetz fibrations, which is a generalization of hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations. We construct involutions on the total spaces of such fibrations of genus $g\geq…
Let M be a 4-manifold with residually finite fundamental group G having b_1(G) > 0. Assume that M carries a symplectic structure with trivial canonical class K = 0 in H^2(M). Using a theorem of Bauer and Li, together with some classical…
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…
We continue to develop an obstruction theory for embedding 2-spheres into 4-manifolds in terms of Whitney towers. The proposed intersection invariants take values in certain graded abelian groups generated by labelled trivalent trees, and…
Associated to any manifold equipped with a closed form of degree >1 is an `L-infinity algebra of observables' which acts as a higher/homotopy analog of the Poisson algebra of functions on a symplectic manifold. In order to study Lie group…