Related papers: Non-orientable slice surfaces and inscribed rectan…

In this paper we show that there are two symplectic surfaces in the 4-ball which bound the same transverse knot, have the same topology (as abstract surfaces), and are distinguished by the fundamental groups of their complements.

A longstanding avenue of research in orientable surface topology is to create and enumerate collections of curves in surfaces with certain intersection properties. We look for similar collections of curves in non-orientable surfaces. A…

In [HT], two of us constructed a closed oriented 4-dimensional manifold with fundamental group $\Z$ that does not split off $S^1\times S^3$. In this note we show that this 4-manifold, and various others derived from it, do not admit smooth…

All knots in $R^3$ possess Seifert surfaces, and so the classical Thurston-Bennequin and rotation (or Maslov) invariants for Legendrian knots in a contact structure on $R^3$ can be defined. The definitions extend easily to null-homologous…

Various structural properties are developed for non-orientable surfaces in link spaces. The M\"obius band tree is described to represent genus growth of one-sided surfaces in solid tori. The structure of the Tree allows various insights…

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…

In an earlier work, we introduced a family of t-modified knot Floer homologies, defined by modifying the construction of knot Floer homology HFK-minus. The resulting groups were then used to define concordance homomorphisms indexed by t in…

We prove that the signature bound for the topological 4-genus of 3-strand torus knots is sharp, using McCoy's twisting method. We also show that the bound is off by at most 1 for 4-strand and 6-strand torus knots, and improve the upper…

We study the existence of incompressible embeddings of surfaces into the genus two handlebody. We show that for every compact surface with boundary, orientable or not, there is an incompressible embedding of the surface into the genus two…

If a knot K in a closed, orientable 3-manifold M has a bridge surface T with distance at least 3 in the curve complex of T - K, then the genus of any essential surface in its exterior with non-empty, non-meridional boundary gives rise to an…

It is known that the fundamental group homomorphism $\pi_1(T^2) \to \pi_1(S^3\setminus K)$ induced by the inclusion of the boundary torus into the complement of a knot $K$ in $S^3$ is a complete knot invariant. Many classical invariants of…

J. Boyle classified 1-handles attached to surface-knots, that are closed and connected surfaces embedded in the Euclidean 4-space, in the case that the surfaces are oriented and 1-handles are orientable with respect to the orientations of…

We study locally flat, compact, oriented surfaces in $4$-manifolds whose exteriors have infinite cyclic fundamental group. We give algebraic topological criteria for two such surfaces, with the same genus $g$, to be related by an ambient…

The fundamental quandle is an invariant for distinguishing surface knots, yet computable presentations have traditionally been limited to surfaces embedded in the $4$-sphere. Building on the framework of banded unlink diagrams introduced by…

A slice-torus invariant is an $\mathbb{R}$-valued homomorphism on the knot concordance group whose value gives a lower bound for the 4-genus such that the equality holds for any positive torus knot. Such invariants have been discovered in…

This paper considers aspects of 4-manifold topology from the point of view of the null cone of a neutral metric, a point of view we call neutral causal topology. In particular, we construct and investigate neutral 4-manifolds with null…

An important difference between high dimensional smooth manifolds and smooth 4-manifolds that in a 4-manifold it is not always possible to represent every middle dimensional homology class with a smoothly embedded sphere. This is true even…

We consider slice disks for knots in the boundary of a smooth compact 4-manifold $X^{4}$. We call a knot $K \subset \partial X$ deep slice in $X$ if there is a smooth properly embedded 2-disk in $X$ with boundary $K$, but $K$ is not…

We introduce a method to detect exotic surfaces without explicitly using a smooth 4-manifold invariant or an invariant of a 4-manifold-surface pair in the construction. Our main tools are two versions of families (Seiberg-Witten)…

Symmetry of geometrical figures is reflected in regularities of their algebraic invariants. Algebraic regularities are often preserved when the geometrical figure is topologically deformed. The most natural, intuitively simple but…