Related papers: Trisections with Kirby-Thompson length 2
In this paper, we establish a version of the adjunction inequality for closed symplectic 4-manifolds. As in a previous paper on the Thom conjecture, we use contact geometry and trisections of 4-manifolds to reduce this inequality to the…
Let T be a triangulation of a simple polygon. A flip in T is the operation of removing one diagonal of T and adding a different one such that the resulting graph is again a triangulation. The flip distance between two triangulations is the…
It is known since 1954 that every 3-manifold bounds a 4-manifold. Thus, for instance, every 3-manifold has a surgery diagram. There are several proofs of this fact, including constructive proofs, but there has been little attention to the…
We show that the only closed 4-manifolds admitting genus two trisections are $S^2 \times S^2$ and connected sums of $S^1 \times S^3$, $\mathbb{CP}^2$, and $\overline{\mathbb{CP}}^2$ with two summands. Moreover, each of these manifolds…
Every element in the first cohomology group of a 3--manifold is dual to embedded surfaces. The Thurston norm measures the minimal `complexity' of such surfaces. For instance the Thurston norm of a knot complement determines the genus of the…
We derive formulas for the mean curvature of associative 3-folds, coassociative 4-folds, and Cayley 4-folds in the general case where the ambient space has intrinsic torsion. Consequently, we are able to characterize those G2-structures…
We examine questions about surgery on links which arise naturally from the trisection decomposition of 4-manifolds developed by Gay and Kirby. These links lie on Heegaard surfaces in $\#^j S^1 \times S^2$ and have surgeries yielding $\#^k…
The goal of this paper is to construct distinct trisections of the same genus on a fixed 4-manifold. For every $k \geq 2$, we construct $2^{k}-1$ non-diffeomorphic $(3k,k)$-trisections on infinitely many 4-manifolds. Here, the manifolds are…
Geometrical spines are defined for 3-manifolds with natural metrics, in particular, for lens manifolds. We show that any spine of L(p,q) close enough to its geometrical spine (i.e., to the cut locus with respect to the standard metric)…
Scharlemann and Thompson define the width of a 3-manifold M as a notion of complexity based on the topology of M. Their original definition had the property that the adjacency relation on handles gave a linear order on handles, but here we…
In this paper, we prove that the trisection genus of the Akbulut cork is $3$ and construct infinitely many corks with trisection genus $3$. These results give the first examples of contractible $4$-manifolds whose trisection genera are…
We show that any 4-manifold admitting a $(g;k_1,k_2,0)$-trisection is an irregular 3-fold cover of the 4-sphere whose branching set is a surface in $S^4$, smoothly embedded except for one singular point which is the cone on a link. A…
We show that the members of a large class of unbalanced four-manifold trisections are standard, and we present a family of trisections that is likely to include non-standard trisections of the four-sphere. As an application, we prove a…
In any triangle, the perpendicular side bisectors meet the corresponding internal angle bisectors on the circumcircle. If we take those three points as the vertices of a new triangle and repeat the operation indefinitly, we end up in the…
These notes summarize and expand on a mini-course given at CIRM in February 2018 as part of Winter Braids VIII. We somewhat obsessively develop the slogan `Trisections are to 4-manifolds as Heegaard splittings are to 3-manifolds', focusing…
Twisted permutation codes, introduced recently by the second and third authors, are frequency permutation arrays. They are similar to repetition permutation codes, in that they are obtained by a repetition construction applied to a smaller…
We study Kauffman's model of folded ribbon knots: knots made of a thin strip of paper folded flat in the plane. The folded ribbonlength is the length to width ratio of such a ribbon knot. We give upper bounds on the folded ribbonlength of…
We introduce bridge trisections of knotted surfaces in the four-sphere. This description is inspired by the work of Gay and Kirby on trisections of four-manifolds and extends the classical concept of bridge splittings of links in the…
A bisection of a graph is a bipartition of its vertex set in which the number of vertices in the two parts differ by at most 1, and its size is the number of edges which go across the two parts. In this paper, motivated by several questions…
Extremal length is a conformal invariant that transfers naturally to the discrete setting, giving square tilings as a natural combinatorial analog of conformal mappings. Recent work by S. Hersonsky has explored generalizing these ideas to…