Related papers: Handle decompositions for a class of closed orient…

We study simple wrinkled fibrations, a variation of the simplified purely wrinkled fibrations introduced by Williams, and their combinatorial description in terms of surface diagrams. We show that simple wrinkled fibrations induce handle…

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 extend a result of Guan by showing that the second Betti number of a 4-dimensional primitively symplectic orbifold is at most 23 and there are at most 91 singular points. The maximal possibility 23 can only occur in the smooth case. In…

We present a handlebody construction of small symplectic caps, and hence of small closed symplectic 4-manifolds. We use this to construct handlebody descriptions of symplectic embeddings of rational homology balls in…

The present work is concerned with the study of four-dimensional irreducible holomorphic symplectic manifolds with second Betti number $23$. We describe their birational geometry and their relations to EPW sextics.

First steps towards a classification of irreducible symplectic 4-folds whose integral 2-cohomology with 4-tuple cup product is isomorphic to that of Hilb^2(K3). We prove that any such 4-fold deforms to an irreducible symplectic 4-fold of…

We describe an algorithm to subdivide automatically a given set of PL n-manifolds (via coloured triangulations or, equivalently, via crystallizations) into classes whose elements are PL-homeomorphic. The algorithm, implemented in the case…

We extend Matveev's complexity of 3-manifolds to PL compact manifolds of arbitrary dimension, and we study its properties. The complexity of a manifold is the minimum number of vertices in a simple spine. We study how this quantity changes…

There are various results that frame left-orderability of a group as a geometric property. Indeed, the fundamental group of a 3-manifold is left-orderable whenever the first Betti number is positive; in the case that the first Betti number…

We show that closed, connected 4-manifolds up to connected sum with copies of the complex projective plane are classified in terms of the fundamental group, the orientation character and an extension class involving the second homotopy…

Given a symplectic three-fold $(M,\omega)$ we show that for a generic almost complex structure $J$ which is compatible with $\omega$, there are finitely many $J$-holomorphic curves in $M$ of any genus $g\geq 0$ representing a homology class…

Generalizing Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds and trisections of 4-manifolds, we consider multisections of higher-dimensional smooth (or PL) closed orientable manifolds, namely decompositions into 1-handlebodies whose subcollections…

Let $\mathrm{Mod}(S_g)$ be the mapping class group of the closed orientable surface $S_g$ of genus $g\geq 2$. In this paper, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which two torsion elements in $\mathrm{Mod}(S_g)$ will have…

In this paper we compute the mapping class group of simply-connected closed smooth manifolds $M$ with integral homology $H_{*}(M) \cong \mathbb Z \oplus \mathbb Z \oplus \mathbb Z$ provided that $\dim M \ne 4$.

Positive Dehn twist products for some elements of finite order in the mapping class group of a 2-dimensional closed, compact, oriented surface $\Sigma_g$, which are rotations of $\Sigma_g$ through $2\pi /p$, are presented. The homeomorphism…

We study smooth proper embeddings of compact orientable surfaces in compact orientable $4$-manifolds and elements in the mapping class group of that surface which are induced by diffeomorphisms of the ambient $4$-manifolds. We call such…

We investigate the orderability properties of fundamental groups of 3-dimensional manifolds. Many 3-manifold groups support left-invariant orderings, including all compact P^2-irreducible manifolds with positive first Betti number. For…

A recent result of Funayoshi-Koda shows that a handlebody-knot of genus two has a finite symmetry group if and only if it is hyperbolic -- the exterior admits a hyperbolic structure with totally geodesic boundary -- or irreducible,…

Given an oriented surface of positive genus with finitely many punctures, we classify the finite orbits of the mapping class group action on the moduli space of semisimple complex special linear two dimensional representations of the…

The topology of broken Lefschetz fibrations is studied by means of handle decompositions. We consider a slight generalization of round handles, and describe the handle diagrams for all that appear in dimension four. We establish simplified…