Related papers: Equivariantly slicing strongly negative amphichira…
A knot in $S^3$ is rationally slice if it bounds a disk in a rational homology ball. We give an infinite family of rationally slice knots that are linearly independent in the knot concordance group. In particular, our examples are all…
A knot in the three-sphere is doubly slice if it is the cross-section of an unknotted two-sphere in the four-sphere. For low-crossing knots, the most complete work to date gives a classification of doubly slice knots through 9 crossings. We…
Given a simply-connected 4-manifold with boundary the 3-sphere, this paper establishes sufficient conditions for a knot in the boundary to be sliced by a locally flat disc in the 4-manifold, whose complement has finite cyclic fundamental…
Squeezed knots are those knots that appear as slices of genus-minimizing oriented smooth cobordisms between positive and negative torus knots. We show that this class of knots is large and discuss how to obstruct squeezedness. The most…
We construct ribbon surfaces of Euler characteristic one for several infinite families of alternating 3-braid closures. We also use a twisted Alexander polynomial obstruction to conclude the classification of smoothly slice knots which are…
To a smooth, compact, oriented, properly-embedded surface in the $4$-ball, we define an invariant of its boundary-preserving isotopy class from the Khovanov homology of its boundary link. Previous work showed that when the boundary link is…
4x4x3 absolutely nonsingular tensors are characterized by their determinant polynomial. Non-quivalence among absolutely nonsingular tensors with respect to a class of linear transformations, which do not chage the tensor rank,is studied. It…
Using an obstruction based on Donaldson's theorem, we derive strong restrictions on when a Seifert fibered space $Y = F(e; \frac{p_1}{q_1}, \ldots, \frac{p_k}{q_k})$ over an orientable base surface $F$ can smoothly embed in $S^4$. This…
Let $W$ be a compact smooth $4$-manifold that deformation retract to a PL embedded closed surface. One can arrange the embedding to have at most one non-locally-flat point, and near the point the topology of the embedding is encoded in the…
We use the Heegaard Floer obstructions defined by Grigsby, Ruberman, and Strle to show that forty-six of the sixty-seven knots through eleven crossings whose concordance orders were previously unknown have infinite concordance order.
Ozsvath and Szabo defined an analog of the Froyshov invariant in the form of a correction term for the grading in Heegaard Floer homology. Applying this to the double cover of the 3-sphere branched over a knot K, we obtain an invariant…
Let $M$ be a connected, closed, oriented three-manifold and $K$, $L$ two rationally null-homologous oriented simple closed curves in $M$. We give an explicit algorithm for computing the linking number between $K$ and $L$ in terms of a…
We discuss how to apply work of L. Rudolph to braid conjugacy class invariants to obtain potentially effective obstructions to a slice knot being ribbon. We then apply these ideas to a family of braid conjugacy class invariants coming from…
A knot in the 3-sphere is said to have zero negative unknotting number if it can be transformed into the unknot by performing only positive crossing changes. In this paper, we provide an obstruction for a knot to having zero negative…
We prove that all knots with unknotting number at most 21 are smoothly slice in the K3 surface. We also prove a more general statement for 4-manifolds that contain a plumbing tree of spheres. Our strategy is based on a flexible method to…
We give a new geometric obstruction to the iterated Bing double of a knot being a slice link: for n>1 the (n+1)-st iterated Bing double of a knot is rationally slice if and only if the n-th iterated Bing double of the knot is rationally…
We present an enhanced prime decomposition theorem for knots that gives the isotopy classes of composite knots that can be constructed from a given list of prime factors (allowing for the mirroring and orientation reversing for each…
We prove that all currently known examples of manifolds with nonnegative sectional curvature satisfy a stronger condition: their curvature operator can be modified with a 4-form to become positive-semidefinite.
Consider a dihedral cover $f: Y\to X$ with $X$ and $Y$ four-manifolds and $f$ branched along an oriented surface embedded in $X$ with isolated cone singularities. We prove that only a slice knot can arise as the unique singularity on an…
We prove that twisted correction terms in Heegaard Floer homology provide lower bounds on the Thurston norm of certain cohomology classes determined by the strong concordance class of a 2-component link $L$ in $S^3$. We then specialise this…