Related papers: Cutting and Gluing Surfaces

Generalizing our ideas in [arXiv:1006.3313], we explain how topologically-twisted N=2 gauge theory on a four-manifold with boundary, will allow us to furnish purely physical proofs of (i) the Atiyah-Floer conjecture, (ii) Munoz's theorem…

Conjecturally, a knot is slice if and only if its positive Whitehead double is slice. We consider an analogue of this conjecture for slice disks in the four-ball: two slice disks of a knot are smoothly isotopic if and only if their positive…

Internal stabilization adds a trivial handle to an embedded surface in a coordinate chart. It is known that any pair of smoothly knotted surfaces in a simply-connected $4$-manifold become smoothly isotopic after sufficiently many internal…

Associated to a closed, oriented surface S is the complex vector space with basis the set of all compact, oriented 3-manifolds which it bounds. Gluing along S defines a Hermitian pairing on this space with values in the complex vector space…

We define sutured Heegaard diagrams for null-homologous knots in 3-manifolds. These diagrams are useful for computing the knot Floer homology at the top filtration level. As an application, we give a formula for the knot Floer homology of a…

We provide three 3-dimensional characterizations of the Z-slice genus of a knot, the minimal genus of a locally-flat surface in 4-space cobounding the knot whose complement has cyclic fundamental group: in terms of balanced algebraic…

We show that a quasipositive surface with disconnected boundary induces a map between the knot Floer homology groups of its boundary components preserving the transverse invariant. As an application, we show that this invariant can be used…

`Gluing' is a technique of constructing solutions to non-linear (elliptic) partial differential equations such as Yang--Mills equations, minimal surface equations and Einstein equations. Calibrated submanifolds are a certain class of…

We construct a graph complex calculating the integral ho- mology of the bordered mapping class groups. We compute the ho- mology of the bordered mapping class groups of various surfaces. Using the circle action on this graph complex, we…

Flip graphs of non-crossing configurations in the plane are widely studied objects, e.g., flip graph of triangulations, spanning trees, Hamiltonian cycles, and perfect matchings. Typically, it is an easy exercise to prove connectivity of a…

In this paper, we define grid homologies for singular links in lens spaces and use them to construct a resolution cube for knot Floer homology of regular links in lens spaces. The results will first be proved over $\mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z}$…

Goulden and Jackson first introduced the cut-and-join operator. The cut-and-join is widely used in studying the Hurwitz number and many other topological recursion problems. Mironov, Morosov and Natanzon give a more general construction and…

By applying Seifert's algorithm to a special alternating diagram of a link L, one obtains a Seifert surface F of L. We show that the support of the sutured Floer homology of the sutured manifold complementary to F is affine isomorphic to…

For a subset $X$ of the vertex set $\VV(\GG)$ of a graph $\GG$, we denote the set of edges of $\GG$ which have exactly one end in $X$ by $\partial(X)$ and refer to it as the cut of $X$ or edge cut $\partial(X)$. A graph $\GG=(\VV,\EE)$ is…

For closed 3-manifolds, Heegaard Floer homology is related to the Thurston norm through results due to Ozsv\'ath and Szab\'o, Ni, and Hedden. For example, given a closed 3-manifold Y, there is a bijection between vertices of the HF^+(Y)…

Sutured Floer homology, denoted by SFH, is an invariant of balanced sutured manifolds previously defined by the author. In this paper we give a formula that shows how this invariant changes under surface decompositions. In particular, if…

Consider a graph drawn on a surface (for example, the plane minus a finite set of obstacle points), possibly with crossings. We provide an algorithm to decide whether such a drawing can be untangled, namely, if one can slide the vertices…

New lower bounds on the unknotting number of a knot are constructed from the classical knot signature function. These bounds can be twice as strong as previously known signature bounds. They can also be stronger than known bounds arising…

We demonstrate that graphs embedded on surfaces are a powerful and practical tool to generate, characterize and simulate networks with a broad range of properties. Remarkably, the study of topologically embedded graphs is non-restrictive…

In this paper we will show that two surfaces of the same genus and homology class in a simply connected 4-manifold are concordant. We will show they are often topologically isotopic when their complements have cyclic fundamental group.…