Related papers: Introduction to Whitney Towers
This is the second in a series of papers dedicated to studying w-knots, and more generally, w-knotted objects (w-braids, w-tangles, etc.). These are classes of knotted objects that are wider but weaker than their "usual" counterparts. To…
We study smooth, proper embeddings of noncompact surfaces in 4-manifolds, focusing on exotic planes and annuli, i.e., embeddings pairwise homeomorphic to the standard embeddings of R^2 and R^2-int D^2 in R^4. We encounter two uncountable…
The paper contains a talk given by the author at the Banach Center in Spring 1995. It recapitulates author's approach to construction of topological invariants of the Reshetikhin-Turaev-Witten type of 3- and 4-dimensional manifolds in the…
This work concludes a series of four papers on the foundational theory of orbifolds and stacks. We apply the abstract theory, developed in its predecessors, to orbifolds derived from manifolds. Specifically, we show how the very concrete…
These are lecture notes for a 4h mini-course held in Toulouse, May 9-12th, at the thematic school on "Quantum topology and geometry". The goal of these lectures is to (a) explain some incarnations, in the last ten years, of the idea of…
The aim of these notes (which were partially covered in lectures given at the Peyresq Summer School on 17--22 June, 2002) is to give an introduction to some mathematical aspects of supersymmetry. Some (hopefully) original point of view are…
This is a pedagogical introduction into theories with branes and extra dimensions. We first discuss the construction of such models from an effective field theory point of view, and then discuss large extra dimensions and some of their…
We begin with a brief sketch of what is known and conjectured concerning braided monoidal 2-categories and their applications to 4d topological quantum field theories and 2-tangles (surfaces embedded in 4-dimensional space). Then we give…
In the present paper, we revisit the geometry of smooth plane quartics and their bitangents from several perspectives. First, we study in detail the weak combinatorics of arrangements of bitangents associated with highly symmetric quartic…
Studying the M-branes leads us naturally to new structures that we call Membrane-, Membrane^c-, String^K(Z,3)- and Fivebrane^K(Z,4)-structures, which we show can also have twisted counterparts. We study some of their basic properties,…
In this paper we introduce the twistor space of a Riemannian manifold with an even Clifford structure. This notion generalizes the twistor space of quaternion-Hermitian manifolds and weak-Spin(9) structures. We also construct almost complex…
Four lectures on invertible field theories at the Park City Mathematics Institute 2019. Cobordism categories are introduced both as plain categories and topologically enriched. We then discuss localization of categories and its relationship…
In these notes, we describe several geometric interpretations of $H^2(X)$ when $X$ is a trisected 4-manifold. The main insight is that, by analogy with Hodge theory and sheaf cohomology in algebraic geometry, classes in $H^2(X)$ can be…
These notes are based on the mini-course given in June 2004 in Cetraro, Italy, in the frame of a C.I.M.E. school. Of course, they contain much more material that I could present in the 6 hours course. The main goal is to give an idea of the…
These are the extended notes of a talk I gave at the Geometric Topology Seminar of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn on January 30th, 2012. My goal was to familiarize the topologists with the basics of arithmetic hyperbolic…
This article is about Artin's braid group and its role in knot theory. We set ourselves two goals: (i) to provide enough of the essential background so that our review would be accessible to graduate students, and (ii) to focus on those…
It is shown that twisted $n$-layers have an intrinsic degree of freedom living on $2n$-tori, which is the phason supplied by the relative slidings of the layers and that the twist generates pseudo magnetic fields. As a result, twisted…
We introduce the concept of pseudo-trisections of smooth oriented compact 4-manifolds with boundary. The main feature of pseudo-trisections is that they have lower complexity than relative trisections for given 4-manifolds. We prove…
We introduce invariant rings for forms (homogeneous polynomials) and for d points on the projective space, from the point of view of representation theory. We discuss several examples, addressing some computational issues. We introduce the…
This article presents a new and more elementary proof of the main Seiberg-Witten-based obstruction to the existence of Einstein metrics on smooth compact 4-manifolds. It also introduces a new smooth manifold invariant which conveniently…