Related papers: Lifting Branched Covers to Braided Embeddings

Prime power fold cyclic branched covers along smoothly slice knots all bound rational homology balls. This phenomenon, however, does not characterize slice knots. In this paper, we give a new construction of non-slice knots that have the…

Let $M$ be a 3-manifold. Every knotted (embedded) surface in $M \times \R$ can be moved via an ambient isotopy in such a way that its projection into $M$ is a generic surface. A surface is generic if every point on it is either a regular,…

For each braided category $\mathcal{C}$ we show that, under mild hypotheses, there is an associated category of "half braided algebras" and their bimodules internal to $\mathcal{C}$ which is not only monoidal but even braided and balanced.…

Many three dimensional manifolds are two-fold branched covers of the three dimensional sphere. However, there are some that are not. This paper includes exposition about two-fold branched covers and many examples. It shows that there are…

Bredon and Wood have given a complete answer to the embeddability question for nonorientable surfaces in lens spaces. They formulate their result in terms of a recursive formula that determines, for a given lens space, the minimal genus of…

A classical branched cover is an open surjection of compact Hausdorff spaces with uniformly bounded finite fibers and analogously, a quantum branched cover is a unital $C^*$ embedding admitting a finite-index expectation. We show that…

In this paper, we make use of the relations between the braid and mapping class groups of a compact, connected, non-orientable surface N without boundary and those of its orientable double covering S to study embeddings of these groups and…

It is shown that any smooth closed orientable manifold of dimension $2k + 1$, $k \geq 2$, admits a smooth polynomially convex embedding into $\mathbb C^{3k}$. This improves by $1$ the previously known lower bound of $3k+1$ on the possible…

We discuss various aspects of "braid spaces'' or configuration spaces of unordered points on manifolds. First we describe how the homology of these spaces is affected by puncturing the underlying manifold, hence extending some results of…

Branch points of a real 2-surface S in a 4-manifold M generalize the branch points of complex curves in complex surfaces: for example, they can occur as singularities of minimal surfaces. We investigate such a branch point p when S is…

We provide new branched covering representations for bounded and/or non-compact 4-manifolds, which extend the known ones for closed 4-manifolds. Assuming $M$ to be a connected oriented PL 4-manifold, our main results are the following: (1)…

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 consider finite-sheeted, regular, possibly branched covering spaces of compact surfaces with boundary and the associated liftable and symmetric mapping class groups. In particular, we classify when either of these subgroups coincides…

We discuss various aspects of `braid spaces' or configuration spaces of unordered points on manifolds. First we describe how the homology of these spaces is affected by puncturing the underlying manifold, hence extending some results of…

When $\pi:\widetilde{\Sigma}\rightarrow D^2$ is a cover of the disc branched over $n$ marked points, the braid group $B_n$ acts on the disc by homeomorphisms fixing the marked points setwise. A braid $\beta$ \textit{lifts} if there is a…

The anomaly of non-invertible higher-form symmetries is determined by the braiding of topological operators implementing them. In this paper, we study a method to classify braidings on topological line and surface operators by leveraging…

We introduce the notion of a braiding on a skew monoidal category, whose curious feature is that the defining isomorphisms involve three objects rather than two. These braidings are shown to arise from, and classify, cobraidings (also known…

We present a complex matrix gauge model defined on an arbitrary two-dimensional orientable lattice. We rewrite the model's partition function in terms of a sum over representations of the group U(N). The model solves the general…

We show that any homologically non-trivial Dehn twist of a compact surface F with boundary is the lifting of a half-twist in the braid group B_n, with respect to a suitable branched covering p : F -> B^2. In particular, we allow the surface…

We study the existence of irreducible $SU(2)$-representations for cyclic branched covers of knots in $S^3$. Our main result establishes that if $K$ is a non-trivial prime knot and $d$ is an integer such that $d \geq 2$ and $\Sigma_d(K)$ is…