Related papers: Pretzel links, mutation, and the slice-ribbon conj…

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…

Let p be an odd prime, let S be a finite set of primes q congruent to 1 mod p but not mod p^2 and let G_S be the Galois group of the maximal p-extension of Q un-ramified outside of S. If r is a continuous homomorphism of G_S into GL_2(Z_p)…

We conjecture that, if the quotient of two $q$-binomial coefficients with the same top argument is a polynomial, then it has non-negative coefficients. We summarise what is known about the conjecture and prove it in two non-trivial cases.…

If A/K is an abelian variety over a number field and P and Q are rational points, the original support conjecture asserted that if the order of Q (mod p) divides the order of P (mod p) for almost all primes p of K, then Q is obtained from P…

We prove some necessary conditions for a link to be either concordant to a quasi-positive link, quasi-positive, positive, or the closure of a positive braid. The main applications of our results are a characterisation of positive links with…

We classify fibered ribbon pretzel knots up to mutation. The classification is complete, except perhaps for members of Lecuona's ``exceptional'' family of [Lec15]. The result is obtained by combining lattice embedding techniques with…

We prove the non-left-orderability of the fundamental group of the $n$-th fold cyclic branched cover of the pretzel knot $P(3,-3,-2k-1)$ for all integers $k$ and $n\ge 1$. These $3$-manifolds are $L$-spaces discovered by Issa and Turner.

We compute the involutive knot invariants for pretzel knots of the form P(-2,m,n) for m and n odd and greater than or equal to 3.

Bing doubling is an operation which produces a 2-component boundary link B(K) from a knot K. If K is slice, then B(K) is easily seen to be boundary slice. In this paper, we investigate whether the converse holds. Our main result is that if…

We define Casson-Gordon sigma-invariants for links and give a lower bound of the slice genus of a link in terms of these invariants. We study as an example a family of two component links of genus h and show that their slice genus is h,…

We study the representation spaces $R(K;\bf{i})$ as appearing in Kronheimer and Mrowka's framed instanton knot Floer homology, for a class of pretzel knots. In particular, for pretzel knots $P(p,q,r)$ with $p, q, r$ pairwise coprime, these…

Let $L$ be an alternating prime non-split link in $S^3$. We use the category of flypes between reduced alternating diagrams for $L$ to classify involutions on $L$. As consequences, we show that the quotient of an alternating periodic link…

We generalise theorems of Cochran-Lickorish and Owens-Strle to the case of links with more than one component. This enables the use of linking forms on double branched covers, Heegaard Floer correction terms, and Donaldson's diagonalisation…

We develop a theory of chain complex double-cobordism for chain complexes equipped with Poincar\'{e} duality. The resulting double-cobordism groups are a refinement of Ranicki's torsion algebraic $L$-groups for localisations of a…

Let L be an oriented (d+1)-component link in the 3-sphere, and let L(q) be the d-component link in a homology 3-sphere that results from performing 1/q-surgery on the last component. Results about the Alexander polynomial and twisted…

The stable Kauffman conjecture posits that a knot in $S^3$ is slice if and only if it admits a slice derivative. We prove a related statement: A knot is handle-ribbon (also called strongly homotopy-ribbon) in a homotopy 4-ball $B$ if and…

We introduce a new technique for showing classical knots and links are not slice. As one application we resolve a long-standing question as to whether certain natural families of knots contain topologically slice knots. We also present a…

Define the complete n-complex on N vertices to be the n-skeleton of an (N-1)-simplex. We show that embeddings of sufficiently large complete n-complexes in R^{2n+1} necessarily exhibit complicated linking behaviour, thereby extending known…

We obtain new invariants of topological link concordance and homology cobordism of 3-manifolds from Hirzebruch-type intersection form defects of towers of iterated p-covers. Our invariants can extract geometric information from an arbitrary…

We study the AJ conjecture for $(r,2)$-cables of a knot, where $r$ is an odd integer. Using skein theory, we show that the AJ conjecture holds true for most $(r,2)$-cables of some classes of two-bridge knots and pretzel knots.