Related papers: Compact Stein surfaces as branched covers with sam…

The topology of Stein surfaces and contact 3-manifolds is studied by means of handle decompositions. A simple characterization of homeomorphism types of Stein surfaces is obtained --- they correspond to open handlebodies with all handles of…

Given a simply-connected closed 4-manifold $X$ and a smoothly embedded oriented surface $\Sigma$, various constructions based on Fintushel-Stern knot surgery have produced new surfaces in $X$ that are pairwise homeomorphic to $\Sigma$, but…

From any 4-dimensional oriented handlebody X without 3- and 4-handles and with b_2>0, we construct arbitrary many compact Stein 4-manifolds which are mutually homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to each other, so that their topological…

Branched covering have a long history from ramification of Riemann surfaces to realization of 3-manifolds as covering ramified over a knots; from geometrical topology to algebraic geometry. The present work investigates a notion of branched…

In this article we prove that, if $X$ is a smooth $4$-manifold containing an embedded double node neighborhood, all knot surgery $4$-manifolds $X_K$ are mutually diffeomorphic to each other after a connected sum with $\mathbb{CP}^2$. Hence,…

In this paper we study the homeomorphisms of the disk that are liftable with respect to a simple branched covering. Since any such homeomorphism maps the branch set of the covering onto itself and liftability is invariant up to isotopy…

Let $X$ be a connected compact 3-manifold with non-empty boundary. Consider the boundary $M$ of $X\times D^2$. $M$ is a 4-dimensional closed manifold and has the same fundamental group as $X$. Various examples of $X$ are known for which a…

We give a topological interpretation of the core group invariant of a surface embedded in S^4. We show that the group is isomorphic to the free product of the fundamental group of the double branch cover of S^4 with the surface as a…

A correspondence, by way of Heegaard splittings, between closed oriented 3-manifolds and pairs of surjections from a surface group to a free group has been studied by Stallings, Jaco, and Hempel. This correspondence, by way of trisections,…

Branch points of a real 2-surface S in a 4-manifold M generalize the branch points of complex curves in complex surfaces: for example, they can occur as singularities of minimal surfaces. We investigate such a branch point p when S is…

We introduce a new generalization of Gompf nuclei and give applications. We construct infinitely many exotic smooth structures for a large class of compact 4-manifolds with boundary, regarding topological invariants. We prove that a large…

We study the set $\widehat{\mathcal S}_M$ of framed smoothly slice links which lie on the boundary of the complement of a 1-handlebody in a closed, simply connected, smooth 4-manifold $M$. We show that $\widehat{\mathcal S}_M$ is…

For $m=2$ and $m=3$ we prove that any connected, oriented, open manifold $M^m$ admits a simple branched covering map over $\mathbb{R}^m$. When $M$ has $k$ ends and $k$ is finite, the degree of the cover can be taken to be $mk$. Regardless…

A link in the 3-sphere is homotopically trivial, according to Milnor, if its components bound disjoint maps of disks in the 4-ball. This paper concerns the question of what spaces give rise to the same class of homotopically trivial links…

According to Giroux, contact manifolds can be described as open books whose pages are Stein manifolds. For 5-dimensional contact manifolds the pages are Stein surfaces, which permit a description via Kirby diagrams. We introduce handle…

This article presents an alternate way to prove a result originally proven by Harvey, Kawamuro, and Plamenvskaya in \cite{HaKaPl}. We accomplish this by explicitly constructing an overtwisted disk in the $p$-fold cyclic branched cover of…

We provide sufficient conditions assuring that a suitably decorated 2-polyhedron can be thickened to a compact 4-dimensional Stein domain. We also study a class of flat polyhedra in 4-manifolds and find conditions assuring that they admit…

The topology of symplectic 4-manifolds is related to that of singular plane curves via the concept of branched covers. Thus, various classification problems concerning symplectic 4-manifolds can be reformulated as questions about singular…

We study smooth proper embeddings of compact orientable surfaces in compact orientable $4$-manifolds and elements in the mapping class group of that surface which are induced by diffeomorphisms of the ambient $4$-manifolds. We call such…

Let $K\subset S^3$ be a Fox $p$-colored knot and assume $K$ bounds a locally flat surface $S\subset B^4$ over which the given $p$-coloring extends. This coloring of $S$ induces a dihedral branched cover $X\to S^4$. Its branching set is a…