Related papers: The relative Whitney trick and its applications
We show that contact homology distinguishes infinitely many tight contact structures on any orientable, toroidal, irreducible 3-manifold. As a consequence of the contact homology computations, on a very large class of toroidal manifolds,…
We consider the link invariants defined by the quantum Chern-Simons field theory with compact gauge group U(1) in a closed oriented 3-manifold M. The relation of the abelian link invariants with the homology group of the complement of the…
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…
Gordon and Litherland showed that all compact, unoriented, possibly non-orientable surfaces in $S^3$ bounded by a link are realted by attaching/deleting tubes and half twisted bands. In this note we give an elementary proof for this result.
We introduce continuous Wilson lines to reduce the rank of the gauge group in orbifold constructions. In situations where the orbifold twist can be realised as a rotation in the root lattice of a grand unified group we derive an appealing…
We prove the analogue of the Concordance Implies Isotopy in Codimension $\ge 3$ Theorem for link maps, together with some other its singular analogues. In the case of spherical link maps, a stronger result was independently obtained by P.…
Given a spin rational homology sphere $Y$ equipped with a $\mathbb{Z}/m$-action preserving the spin structure, we use the Seiberg--Witten equations to define equivariant refinements of the invariant $\kappa(Y)$ from \cite{Man14}, which take…
A Coxeter link is a closure of a product of two braids, one being a quasi-Coxeter element and the other being a product of partial full twists. This class of links includes torus knots \(T_{n,k}\) and torus links \(T_{n,nk}\). We identify…
A theorem of Kirby gives a necessary and sufficient condition for two framed links in S^3 to yield orientation-preserving diffeomorphic results of surgery. Kirby's theorem is an important method for constructing invariants of 3-manifolds.…
We investigate the topologies of random geometric complexes built over random points sampled on Riemannian manifolds in the so-called "thermodynamic" regime. We prove the existence of universal limit laws for the topologies; namely, the…
A {\em blink} is a plane graph with an arbitrary bipartition of its edges. As a consequence of a recent result of Martelli, I show that the homeomorphisms classes of closed oriented 3-manifolds are in 1-1 correspondence with specific…
We investigate the topological theory obtained by twisting the N=(2,2) supersymmetric nonlinear sigma model with target a bihermitian space with torsion. For the special case in which the two complex structures commute, we show that the…
A knot in $S^3$ is topologically slice if it bounds a locally flat disk in $B^4$. A knot in $S^3$ is rationally slice if it bounds a smooth disk in a rational homology ball. We prove that the smooth concordance group of topologically and…
Associated to every closed, embedded submanifold $N$ of a connected Riemannian manifold $M$, there is the distance function $d_N$ which measures the distance of a point in $M$ from $N$. We analyze the square of this function and show that…
A crucial step in the surgery-theoretic program to classify smooth manifolds is that of representing a middle--dimensional homology class by a smoothly embedded sphere. This step fails even for the simple 4-manifolds obtained from the…
We give a short, simple and conceptual proof, based on spin structures, of sphere eversion: an embedded 2-sphere in $R^3$ can be turned inside out by regular homotopy. Ingredients of this eversion are seamlessly connected. We also give the…
There is a topological embedding $\iota:\mathbb{S}^1\to\mathbb{R}^5$ such that $\pi_3(\mathbb{R}^5\setminus\iota(\mathbb{S}^1))=0$. Therefore, no $3$-sphere can be linked with $\iota(\mathbb{S}^1)$.
We show that two hypersurfaces in a manifold are related by a sequence of embedded cobordisms if and only if they represent the same homology class. By applying handle decompositions we turn these cobordisms into a sequence of embedded…
We show that if each of $K_1$ and $K_2$ is a trefoil knot or figure eight knot, the homology 3-sphere defined by the Kirby diagram which is a simple link of $K_1$ and $K_2$ with framing (0, n) is represented by an n-twisted Whitehead double…
We continue to develop an obstruction theory for embedding 2-spheres into 4-manifolds in terms of Whitney towers. The proposed intersection invariants take values in certain graded abelian groups generated by labelled trivalent trees, and…