Related papers: The round handle problem

Freedman and Krushkal showed that if the surgery conjecture and the $s$-cobordism conjecture hold for all topological 4-manifolds, then every link with pairwise zero linking numbers is topologically round handle slice. Kim, Powell, and…

Round handles are affiliated with smooth 4-manifolds in two major ways: 5-dimensional round handles appear extensively as the building blocks in cobordisms between 4-manifolds, whereas 4-dimensional round handles are the building blocks of…

A long-standing conjecture due to Michael Freedman asserts that the 4-dimensional topological surgery conjecture fails for non-abelian free groups, or equivalently that a family of canonical examples of links (the generalized Borromean…

The A-B slice problem is a reformulation of the topological 4-dimensional surgery conjecture in terms of decompositions of the 4-ball and link homotopy. We show that link groups, a recently developed invariant of 4-manifolds, provide an…

We give two applications of the 2-Engel relation, classically studied in finite and Lie groups, to the 4-dimensional topological surgery conjecture. The A-B slice problem, a reformulation of the surgery conjecture for free groups, is shown…

We prove that there are homology three-spheres that bound definite four-manifolds, but any such bounding four-manifold must be built out of many handles. The argument uses the homology cobordism invariant $\Gamma$ from instanton Floer…

We give a survey of geometric approaches to the topological 4-dimensional surgery and 5-dimensional s-cobordism conjectures, with a focus on the study of surfaces in 4-manifolds. The geometric lemma underlying these conjectures is a…

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…

We show that only finitely many links in a closed 3-manifold share the same complement, up to twists along discs and annuli. Using the same techniques, we prove that by adding 2-handles on the same link we get only finitely many smooth…

The A-B slice problem, a reformulation of the 4-dimensional topological surgery conjecture for free groups, is shown to admit a link-homotopy+ solution. The proof relies on geometric applications of the group-theoretic 2-Engel relation.…

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…

We present three large families of new examples of plumbed 3-manifolds that bound rational homology 4-balls. These are constructed using two operations, also defined here, that preserve the lack of a lattice embedding obstruction to…

A link in the 3-sphere is called (smoothly) slice if its components bound disjoint smoothly embedded disks in the 4-ball. More generally, given a 4-manifold M with a distinguished circle in its boundary, a link in the 3-sphere is called…

We construct four-dimensional symplectic cobordisms between contact three-manifolds generalizing an example of Eliashberg. One key feature is that any handlebody decomposition of one of these cobordisms must involve three-handles. The other…

The main result is that an s-cobordism (topological or smooth) of 4-manifolds has a product structure outside a ``core'' sub s-cobordism. These cores are arranged to have quite a bit of structure, for example they are smooth and abstractly…

We develop a calculus of surgery data, called bridged links, which involves besides links also pairs of balls that describe one-handle attachements. As opposed to the usual link calculi of Kirby and others this description uses only…

Motivated by Akbulut-Larson's construction of Brieskorn spheres bounding rational homology 4-balls, we explore plumbed 3-manifolds that bound rational homology circles and use them to construct infinite families of rational homology…

We prove that the canonical 4-dimensional surgery problems can be solved after passing to a double cover. This contrasts the long-standing conjecture about the validity of the topological surgery theorem for arbitrary fundamental groups…

In this note, we study the Gehring link problem in the round sphere, which motives our study of the width of a band in positively curved manifolds. Using the same idea, we are able to get a sphere theorem for hypersurface in in the round…

This paper is the second part of our work on 4-dimensional 2-handlebodies. In the first part (arXiv:math.GT/0407032) it is shown that up to certain set of local moves, connected simple coverings of B^4 branched over ribbon surfaces,…