Related papers: Multisections of 4-manifolds
We prove that every smoothly embedded surface in a 4--manifold can be isotoped to be in bridge position with respect to a given trisection of the ambient 4--manifold; that is, after isotopy, the surface meets components of the trisection in…
In this paper we introduce a technique, called rim surgery, which can change a smooth embedding of an orientable surface of positive genus and nonnegative self-intersection in a smooth 4-manifold while leaving the topological embedding…
One approach to produce a pair of homeomorphic-but-not-diffeomophic closed 4-manifolds is to find a knot which is smoothly slice in one but not the other. This approach has never been run successfully. We give the first examples of a pair…
Previously work of the author with Meier and Starkston showed that every closed symplectic manifold $(X,\omega)$ with a rational symplectic form admits a trisection compatible with the symplectic topology. In this paper, we describe the…
We provide a unique decomposition of every 4-connected graph into parts that are either quasi-5-connected, cycles of triangle-torsos and 3-connected torsos on $\leq 5$ vertices, generalised double-wheels, or thickened $K_{4,m}$'s. The…
The goal of this paper is to construct distinct trisections of the same genus on a fixed 4-manifold. For every $k \geq 2$, we construct $2^{k}-1$ non-diffeomorphic $(3k,k)$-trisections on infinitely many 4-manifolds. Here, the manifolds are…
We show that only finitely many links in a closed 3-manifold share the same complement, up to twists along discs and annuli. Using the same techniques, we prove that by adding 2-handles on the same link we get only finitely many smooth…
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…
Bridge multisections are combinatorial descriptions of surface links in 4-space using tuples of trivial tangles. They were introduced by Islambouli, Karimi, Lambert-Cole, and Meier to study curves in rational surfaces. In this paper, we…
We construct smooth manifolds with order two $\pi_1$ and even intersection forms which are irreducible, meaning they do not decompose into non-trivial connected sums. Their intersection forms being even implies that their universal covers…
We give diagrammatic algorithms for computing the group trisection, homology groups, and intersection form of a closed, orientable, smooth 4-manifold, presented as a branched cover of a bridge-trisected surface in $\mathbb{S}^{4}$. The…
Donaldson showed that every closed symplectic 4-manifold can be given the structure of a topological Lefschetz pencil. Gay and Kirby showed that every closed 4-manifold has a trisection. In this paper we relate these two structure theorems,…
We present new explicit decompositions of manifolds via so-called fold maps into lower dimensional spaces. Fold maps form a nice class of so-called generic maps, generalizing Morse functions naturally. To understand the topologies and the…
A combinatorial presentation of closed orientable 3-manifolds as bi-tricolored links is given together with two versions of a calculus via moves to manipulate bi-tricolored links without changing the represented manifold. That is, we…
Rubinstein--Tillmann generalized the notions of Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds and trisections of 4-manifolds by defining {\it multisections} of PL $n$-manifolds, which are decompositions into $k=\lfloor n/2\rfloor+1$ $n$-dimensional…
The purpose of this note is to explain a combinatorial description of closed smooth oriented 4-manifolds in terms of positive Dehn twist factorizations of surface mapping classes, and further explore these connections. This is obtained via…
In this article, we construct countably many mutually non-isotopic diffeomorphisms of some closed non simply-connected 4-manifolds that are homotopic to but not isotopic to the identity, by surgery along $\Theta$-graphs. As corollaries of…
We provide the first information on diffeotopy groups of exotic smoothings of R^4: For each of uncountably many smoothings, there are uncountably many isotopy classes of self-diffeomorphisms. We realize these by various explicit group…
Here we study two interesting smooth contractible manifolds, whose boundaries have non-trivial mapping class groups. The first one is a non-Stein contractible manifold, such that every self diffeomorphism of its boundary extends inside;…
We describe a collection of constructions which illustrate a panoply of ``exotic'' smooth 4-manifolds.