Related papers: Characterizing Dehn surgeries on links via trisect…
Gay and Kirby introduced the notion of a trisection of a smooth 4-manifold, which is a decomposition of the 4-manifold into three elementary pieces. Rubinstein and Tillmann later extended this idea to construct multisections of…
The generalized Dehn twist along a closed curve in an oriented surface is an algebraic construction which involves intersections of loops in the surface. It is defined as an automorphism of the Malcev completion of the fundamental group of…
This paper generalizes the definition of a Heegaard splitting to unify Scharlemann and Thomspon's concept of thin position for 3-manifolds, Gabai's thin position for knots, and Rubinstein's almost normal surface theory. This gives…
Let K be a non-trivial knot in the 3-sphere with a lens space surgery and L(p,q) a lens space obtained by a Dehn surgery on K. We study a relationship between the order of the fundamental group of L(p,q) and the Seifert genus of K.
We study 4-dimensional homology cobordisms without 3-handles, showing that they interact nicely with Thurston geometries, character varieties, and instanton and Heegaard Floer homologies. Using these, we derive obstructions to such…
A multisection of a 4-manifold is a decomposition into 1-handlebodies intersecting pairwise along 3-dimensional handlebodies or along a central closed surface; this generalizes the Gay-Kirby trisections. We show how to compute the twisted…
We introduce a general notion of "genericity" for countable subsets of a space with Borel measure, and apply it to the set of vertices in the curve complex of a surface S, interpreted as subset of the space of projective measured…
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…
We introduce an operation that measures the self intersections of paths on a surface. As applications, we give a criterion of the realizability of a generalized Dehn twist, and derive a geometric constraint on the image of the Johnson…
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…
Motivated by M. Scharlemann and A. Thompson's definition of thin position of 3-manifolds, we define the width of a handle decomposition a 4-manifold and introduce the notion of thin position of a compact smooth 4-manifold. We determine all…
We prove two conjectures of C. Gordon. We show that the maximal number of exceptional Dehn surgeries on a 1-cusped hyperbolic 3-manifold is 10, and that the maximal intersection number between exceptional slopes is 8. The proof uses a…
The cosmetic surgery conjecture predicts that for a non-trivial knot in the three-sphere, performing two different Dehn surgeries results in distinct oriented three-manifolds. Hanselman reduced the problem to $\pm 2$ or $\pm 1/n$ surgeries…
Let $M$ be a $3$--dimensional handlebody of genus $g$. This paper gives examples of hyperbolic knots in $M$ with arbitrarily large genus $g$ bridge number which admit Dehn surgeries which are boundary-reducible manifolds.
We present several structural results on closed, nonorientable, smooth $4$--manifolds, extending analogous results and machinery for the orientable case. We prove the existence of simplified broken Lefschetz fibrations and simplified…
We produce the first examples of closed, tight contact 3-manifolds which become overtwisted after performing admissible transverse surgeries. Along the way, we clarify the relationship between admissible transverse surgery and Legendrian…
Many three dimensional manifolds are two-fold branched covers of the three dimensional sphere. However, there are some that are not. This paper includes exposition about two-fold branched covers and many examples. It shows that there are…
It is shown that with finitely many exceptions, the fundamental group obtained by Dehn surgery on a one cusped hyperbolic 3-manifold contains the fundamental group of a closed surface.
Ruberman gave the first examples of self-diffeomorphisms of four-manifolds that are isotopic to the identity in the topological category but not smoothly so. We give another example of this phenomenon, using the Dehn twist along a 3-sphere…
As an example of the transitions between some of the eight geometries of Thurston, investigated before, we study the geometries supported by the cone-manifolds obtained by surgery on the trefoil knot with singular set the core of the…