Related papers: New Quantum Obstructions to Sliceness
Given a link L in the 3-sphere, we ask whether the components of L bound disjoint, nullhomologous disks properly embedded in a simply-connected positive-definite smooth 4-manifold; the knot case has been studied extensively in work of…
We perform the Hamiltonian constraint analysis for a wide class of gravity theories that are invariant under spatial diffeomorphism. With very general setup, we show that different from the general relativity, the primary and secondary…
Based on the observation that the exterior space-times of Schwarzschild-type solutions allow two symmetric slicings, a static spherically symmetric one and a timelike homogeneous one, modifications of gravitational dynamics suggested by…
We present new obstructions for a knot K in S^3 to admit purely cosmetic surgeries, which arise from the study of Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev invariants at fixed level. In particular, we strengthen a recent result of Hanselman, showing that…
In a groundbreaking work A. Levine proved the surprising result that there exist knots in homology spheres which are not smoothly concordant to any knot in $S^3$, even if one allows for concordances in homology cobordisms. Since then…
We conjecture a relation between the sl(N) knot homology, recently introduced by Khovanov and Rozansky, and the spectrum of BPS states captured by open topological strings. This conjecture leads to new regularities among the sl(N) knot…
There is an infinitely generated free subgroup of the smooth knot concordance group with the property that no nontrivial element in this subgroup can be represented by an alternating knot. This subgroup has the further property that every…
We give a useful classification of the metabelian unitary representations of pi_1(M_K), where M_K is the result of zero-surgery along a knot K in S^3. We show that certain eta invariants associated to metabelian representations pi_1(M_K)…
In this paper we investigate the scalar mode of first-order metric perturbations over spatially flat FRW spacetime when the holonomy correction is taken into account in the semi-classical framework of loop quantum cosmology. By means of the…
We use tools from generalized complex geometry to develop the theory of SKT (a.k.a. pluriclosed Hermitian) manifolds and more generally manifolds with special holonomy with respect to a metric connection with closed skew-symmetric torsion.…
We extend the definition of Khovanov-Lee homology to links in connected sums of $S^1 \times S^2$'s, and construct a Rasmussen-type invariant for null-homologous links in these manifolds. For certain links in $S^1 \times S^2$, we compute the…
Quantum invariants like the colored Jones polynomial are algebraic in nature but are conjectured to detect important information about the geometry of links. In this thesis we explore these connections using an enhanced version of the RT…
In this work, we propose a cohomological approach to studying perturbative anomalies in quantum mechanics. The Hamiltonian $\hat{H}$ together with the symmetry generator $\hat{S}$ forms a unitary representation of the two-dimensional…
Coherence phenomena appear in two different situations. In the context of category theory the term `coherence constraints' refers to a set of diagrams whose commutativity implies the commutativity of a larger class of diagrams. In the…
Hom and Wu introduced the knot concordance invariant $\nu^{+}$ for knots in $S^{3}$ and proved that it gives a lower bound for the slice genus. Wu and Yang extended $\nu^{+}$ to knots in rational homology $3$-spheres, where it gives a lower…
The concordance genus of a knot K is the minimum Seifert genus of all knots smoothly concordant to K. Concordance genus is bounded below by the 4-ball genus and above by the Seifert genus. We give a lower bound for the concordance genus of…
Deformation quantization on varieties with singularities offers perspectives that are not found on manifolds. Essential deformations are classified by the Harrison component of Hochschild cohomology, that vanishes on smooth manifolds and…
From Khovanov homology, we extract a new lower bound for the Gordian distance of knots, which combines and strengthens the previously existing bounds coming from Rasmussen invariants and from torsion invariants. We also improve the bounds…
The phenomenon of linearisation instability is identified in models of quantum cosmology that are perturbations of mini-superspace models. In particular, constraints that are second order in the perturbations must be imposed on wave…
In this paper, we extend the definition of the $SL_2(\Bbb C)$ Casson invariant to arbitrary knots $K$ in integral homology 3-spheres and relate it to the $m$-degree of the $\widehat{A}$-polynomial of $K$. We prove a product formula for the…