Related papers: Non-orientable slice surfaces and inscribed rectan…
We study theta-curves embedded in a standard torus in the 3-sphere. We show that each nontrivial torus knot together with an essential arc determines a prime theta-curve, yielding explicit infinite families of prime theta-curves. We compute…
We show that for any closed, orientable surface $K$ smoothly embedded in $\mathbb{R}^4$, the unit $4$-ball $B^4 \subset \mathbb{R}^4$ can be tiled using $n \geq 3$ tiles each congruent to a regular neighborhood (with corners) of a surface…
For every Sol manifold $M$, we determine the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-Thurston norm of every element in $H_2(M;\mathbb{Z}_2)$. Each Sol manifold is either a torus bundle over the circle or a torus semi-bundle, thus corresponds to a torus map. We…
Simple closed curves in the plane can be mapped to nontrivial knots under the action of origami foldings that allow the paper to self-intersect. We show all tame knot types may be produced in this manner, motivating the development of a new…
We study three knot invariants related to smoothly immersed disks in the four-ball. These are the four-ball crossing number, which is the minimal number of normal double points of such a disk bounded by a given knot; the slicing number,…
The classical knot groups are the fundamental groups of the complements of smooth or piecewise-linear (PL) locally-flat knots. For PL knots that are not locally-flat, there is a pair of interesting groups to study: the fundamental group of…
We consider two natural Lagrangian intersection problems in the context of symplectic toric manifolds: displaceability of torus orbits and of a torus orbit with the real part of the toric manifold. Our remarks address the fact that one can…
A triangulation of a surface is irreducible if no edge can be contracted to produce a triangulation of the same surface. In this paper, we investigate irreducible triangulations of surfaces with boundary. We prove that the number of…
We consider surface links in the 4-space which are presented by the form of simple branched coverings over the standard torus, which we call torus-covering links. In this paper, we study unknotting numbers of torus-covering links. In some…
In this paper, we study stable equivalence of exotically knotted surfaces in 4-manifolds, surfaces that are topologically isotopic but not smoothly isotopic. We prove that any pair of embedded surfaces in the same homology class become…
We prove a surface embedding theorem for 4-manifolds with good fundamental group in the presence of dual spheres, with no restriction on the normal bundles. The new obstruction is a Kervaire-Milnor invariant for surfaces and we give a…
By considering negative surgeries on a knot $K$ in $S^3$, we derive a lower bound to the non-orientable slice genus $\gamma_4(K)$ in terms of the signature $\sigma(K)$ and the concordance invariants $V_i(\overline{K})$, which strengthens a…
We introduce a new real-valued invariant called the natural slope of a hyperbolic knot in the 3-sphere, which is defined in terms of its cusp geometry. We show that twice the knot signature and the natural slope differ by at most a constant…
Using the algebraic geometry method of Berenstein and Leigh for the construction of the toroidal orbifold (T^2 x T^2 x T^2) / (Z_2 x Z_2) with discrete torsion and considering local K3 surfaces, we present non-commutative aspects of the…
Topology and geometry are deeply intertwined in the study of surfaces, though their interaction manifests differently in smooth and discrete settings. In the smooth category, a classical result asserts that any closed smooth surface…
A knot in $S^3$ is topologically slice if it bounds a locally flat disk in $B^4$. A knot in $S^3$ is rationally slice if it bounds a smooth disk in a rational homology ball. We prove that the smooth concordance group of topologically and…
We construct examples of non-isotrivial algebraic families of smooth complex projective curves over a curve of genus 2. This solves a problem from Kirby's list of problems in low-dimensional topology. Namely, we show that 2 is the smallest…
We give a survey of geometric approaches to the topological 4-dimensional surgery and 5-dimensional s-cobordism conjectures, with a focus on the study of surfaces in 4-manifolds. The geometric lemma underlying these conjectures is a…
This paper aims to define and study a notion of orientability in the Heisenberg sense ($\mathbb{H}$-orientability) for the Heisenberg group $\mathbb{H}^n$. In particular, we define such notion for $\mathbb{H}$-regular $1$-codimensional…
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…