Related papers: Knotted 3-balls in S^4

Techniques of gauge theory are used to define and compute an invariant of certain diffeomorphisms of 4-manifolds. The invariant vanishes for any diffeomorphism which is smoothly isotopic to the identity. As an application, we give the first…

Regular homotopy classes of immersions of a 3-sphere in 5-space constitute an infinite cyclic group. The classes containing embeddings form a subgroup of index 24. The obstruction for a generic immersion to be regularly homotopic to an…

We show that in a prime, closed, oriented 3-manifold M, equivalent knots are isotopic if and only if the orientation preserving mapping class group is trivial. In the case of irreducible, closed, oriented $3$-manifolds we show the more…

By extending a result of Kronheimer-Mrowka to the family setting, we prove a gluing formula for the family Seiberg-Witten invariant. This formula allows one to compute the invariant for a smooth family of 4-manifolds by cutting it open…

The elliptic 3-manifolds are the closed 3-manifolds that admit a Riemannian metric of constant positive curvature, that is, those that have finite fundamental group. The (Generalized) Smale Conjecture asserts that for any elliptic…

For embedded 2-spheres in a 4-manifold sharing the same embedded transverse sphere homotopy implies isotopy, provided the ambient 4-manifold has no $\BZ_2$-torsion in the fundamental group. This gives a generalization of the classical light…

We point out that recent constructions of inequivalent smooth structures yield a manufacturing procedure of infinite sets of pairwise smoothly non-isotopic nullhomologous 2-tori and spheres inside a myriad of 4-manifolds. The corresponding…

Any two homologous surfaces of the same genus embedded in a smooth 4-manifold X with simply-connected complements are shown to be smoothly isotopic in the connected sum of X and the product of a 2-sphere with itself, if the surfaces are…

In this paper, we study punctured spheres in two dimensional ball quotient compactifications $(X, D)$. For example, we show that smooth toroidal compactifications of ball quotients cannot contain properly holomorphically embedded…

For each integer $n\ge 2$, we construct infinitely many $n$-component Brunnian links of 3-balls in $S^4$. Our main tool is the third author's result on the existence of splitting spheres for the trivial two-component link of $2$-spheres in…

We develop obstructions to a knot K in the 3-sphere bounding a smooth punctured Klein bottle in the 4-ball. The simplest of these is based on the linking form of the 2-fold branched cover of the 3-sphere branched over K. Stronger…

We consider D3 branes in presence of an S-fold plane. The latter is a non perturbative object, arising from the combined projection of an S-duality twist and a discrete orbifold of the R-symmetry group. This construction naively gives rise…

The classical Poincar{\'e} conjecture that every homotopy 3-sphere is diffeomorphic to the 3-sphere is confirmed by Perelman in arXiv papers solving Thurston's program on geometrizations of 3-manifolds. A new confirmation of this conjecture…

We investigate constraints on embeddings of a non-orientable surface in a $4$-manifold with the homology of $M \times I$, where $M$ is a rational homology $3$-sphere. The constraints take the form of inequalities involving the genus and…

We show that there exist infinitely many pairwise non-isotopic splitting spheres for two unlinked, unknotted $S^2$'s in $S^4$. This answers a question posed by Hughes, Kim, and Miller.

We prove that given two compact oriented $3$-manifolds $N$ and $M,$ with $M$ satisfying only a mild hypothesis, there is a hyperbolic $3$-manifold $N'$ arbitrarily ``closely related'' to $N,$ and such that $N'$ does not embed in $M.$ For…

We report on some recent work on deformation of spaces, notably deformation of spheres, describing two classes of examples. The first class of examples consists of noncommutative manifolds associated with the so called $\theta$-deformations…

We classify the total spaces of bundles over the four sphere with fiber a three sphere up to orientation preserving and reversing homotopy equivalence, homeomorphism and diffeomorphism. These total spaces have been of interest to both…

We give a short proof of Bing's characterization of $S^3$: a compact, connected 3-manifold $M$ is $S^3$ if and only if every knot in $M$ is isotopic into a ball.

In this article, we show that, at least for non-simply connected case, there exist an infinite family of nondiffeomorphic symplectic 4-manifolds with the same Seiberg-Witten invariants. The main techniques are knot surgery and a covering…