Related papers: Compact 4-manifolds admitting special handle decom…
We show that the pre-order defined on the category of contact manifolds by arbitrary symplectic cobordisms is considerably less rigid than its counterparts for exact or Stein cobordisms: in particular, we exhibit large new classes of…
Round handles are affiliated with smooth 4-manifolds in two major ways: 5-dimensional round handles appear extensively as the building blocks in cobordisms between 4-manifolds, whereas 4-dimensional round handles are the building blocks of…
J.H.C. Whitehead introduced the concept of crossed modules in the early 20th century. These crossed modules are crucial for algebraic models of 2-type homotopy, which involve connected spaces with no higher than second-degree homotopy…
Let $X$ be a connected compact 3-manifold with non-empty boundary. Consider the boundary $M$ of $X\times D^2$. $M$ is a 4-dimensional closed manifold and has the same fundamental group as $X$. Various examples of $X$ are known for which a…
Let $W$ be a compact smooth $4$-manifold that deformation retract to a PL embedded closed surface. One can arrange the embedding to have at most one non-locally-flat point, and near the point the topology of the embedding is encoded in the…
We classify four-dimensional compact solvmanifolds up to diffeomorphism, while determining which of them have complex analytic structures. In particular, we shall see that a four-dimensional compact solvmanifold S can be written, up to…
This paper gives sharp linear bounds on the genus of a normal surface in a triangulated compact, orientable 3--manifold in terms of the quadrilaterals in its cell decomposition---different bounds arise from varying hypotheses on the surface…
Let $(\Gamma,\gamma)$ be a crystallization of connected compact 3-manifold $M$ with $h$ boundary components. Let $\mathcal{G}(M)$ and $\mathit k (M)$ be the regular genus and gem-complexity of $M$ respectively, and let $\mathcal{G}(\partial…
We extend several $g$-type theorems for connected, orientable homology manifolds without boundary to manifolds with boundary. As applications of these results we obtain K\"uhnel-type bounds on the Betti numbers as well as on certain…
We introduce several algebraic structures related to handlebody-knots, including $G$-families of biquandles, partially multiplicative biquandles and group decomposable biquandles. These structures can be used to color the semiarcs in…
Let A be the moduli space of (1,p)-polarised abelian surfaces with a level structure, for p an odd prime. Let X be a desingularisation of any algebraic compactification of A. Then X is simply-connected.
Trisections of closed 4-manifolds, first defined and studied by Gay and Kirby, have proved to be a useful tool in the systematic analysis of 4-manifolds via handlebodies. Subsequent work of Abrams, Gay, and Kirby established a connection…
A simplicial complex of dimension $d-1$ is said to be balanced if its graph is $d$-colorable. Juhnke-Kubitzke and Murai proved an analogue of the generalized lower bound theorem for balanced simplicial polytopes. We establish a…
We show that simple coverings of B^4 branched over ribbon surfaces up to certain local ribbon moves bijectively represent orientable 4-dimensional 2-handlebodies up to handle sliding and addition/deletion of cancelling handles. As a…
We prove that any closed simply-connected smooth 4-manifold is 16-fold branched covered by a product of an orientable surface with the 2-torus, where the construction is natural with respect to spin structures. In particular this solves…
We show that every smooth, orientable, closed, connected 4-manifold can be represented by a loop in the pants complex. We use this representation, together with the fact that the pants complex is simply connected, to provide an elementary…
In this article, we propose a new approach for describing and understanding knots and links in a 3-manifold through the use of an embedded non-orientable surface. Specifically, we define a plat-like representation based on this…
We study neighborhoods of configurations of symplectic surfaces in symplectic 4-manifolds. We show that suitably `positive' configurations have neighborhoods with concave boundaries and we explicitly describe open book decompositions of the…
In 2006 Bar{\'a}t and Thomassen conjectured that every planar $4$-edge-connected $4$-regular simple graph of size divisible by three admits a claw-decomposition. Later, Lai (2007) disproved this conjecture by a family of planar graphs with…
We show that, for any $k\geq 1$, there exist non-formal compact orientable $(k-1)$-connected $n$-manifolds with $k$-th Betti number $b_k=b\geq 0$ if and only if $n\geq \max \{4k-1, 4k+3-2b\}$.