Related papers: Knotted handlebodies in the 4-sphere and 5-ball

We compare two naturally arising notions of unknotting number for 2-spheres in the 4-sphere: namely, the minimal number of 1-handle stabilizations needed to obtain an unknotted surface, and the minimal number of Whitney moves required in a…

This paper gives a proof that the fundamental group of a class of closed orientable 3-manifolds constructed from three injective handlebodies has a solvable word problem. This is done by giving an algorithm to decide if a closed curve in…

By using double branched covers, we prove that there is a 1-1 correspondence between the set of knotoids in the 2-sphere, up to orientation reversion and rotation, and knots with a strong inversion, up to conjugacy. This correspondence…

We consider knotted annuli in 4-space, called 2-string-links, which are knotted surfaces in codimension two that are naturally related, via closure operations, to both 2-links and 2-torus links. We classify 2-string-links up to…

Let K be a knot in the 3-sphere. A slope p/q is said to be characterising for K if whenever p/q surgery on K is homeomorphic, via an orientation-preserving homeomorphism, to p/q surgery on another knot K' in the 3-sphere, then K and K' are…

We consider free symmetries on cobordisms between knots. We classify which freely periodic knots bound equivariant surfaces in the 4-ball in terms of corresponding homology classes in lens spaces. A key tool is the homology cobordism…

We show that there exist infinitely many pairs of distinct knots in the 3-sphere such that each pair can yield homeomorphic lens spaces by the same Dehn surgery. Moreover, each knot of the pair can be chosen to be a torus knot, a satellite…

Closed 3-string braids admit many bandings to two-bridge links. By way of the Montesinos Trick, this allows us to construct infinite families of knots in the connected sum of lens spaces L(r,1) # L(s,1) that admit a surgery to a lens space…

We give lower bounds for the tunnel number of knots and handlebody-knots. We also give a lower bound for the cutting number, which is a "dual" notion to the tunnel number in the handlebody-knot theory. We provide necessary conditions for…

The cosmetic crossing conjecture (also known as the "nugatory crossing conjecture") asserts that the only crossing changes that preserve the oriented isotopy class of a knot in the 3-sphere are nugatory. We use the Dehn surgery…

We prove that every 4-dimensional oriented handlebody without 3- and 4-handles can be modified to admit infinitely many exotic smooth structures, and moreover prove that their genus functions are pairwise equivalent. We furthermore show…

A 4-manifold is constructed with some curious metric properties; or maybe it is many 4-manifolds masquerading as one, which would explain why it looks curious. Anyway, knots in the 3-sphere with complete finite volume hyperbolic metrics on…

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…

Extending Haken's Theorem to product annuli and disks for Heegaard splittings of sutured manifolds, we show that the handle number of an irreducible sutured manifold equals the handle number of its guts. We further show that reduced sutured…

Call a smooth knot (or smooth link) in the unit sphere in $\mathbb{C}^2$ analytic (respectively, smoothly analytic) if it bounds a complex curve (respectively, a smooth complex curve) in the complex ball. Let $K$ be a smoothly analytic…

We show that all large enough positive integral surgeries on algebraic knots bound a 4-manifold with a negative definite plumbing tree, which we describe explicitly. Then we apply the lattice embedding obstruction coming from Donaldson's…

Let $\textup{H}_g$ be a genus $g$ handlebody and $\textup{MCG}_{2n}(\textup{T}_g)$ be the group of the isotopy classes of orientation preserving homeomorphisms of $\textup{T}_g=\partial\textup{H}_g$, fixing a given set of $2n$ points. In…

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…

Under a simple assumption on Seifert surfaces, we characterise knots whose stable topological 4-genus coincides with the genus.

Fix a free, orientation-preserving action of a finite group G on a 3-dimensional handlebody V. Whenever G acts freely preserving orientation on a connected 3-manifold X, there is a G-equivariant imbedding of V into X. There are choices of X…