Related papers: The salient crossings of a crown diagram
We study petal diagrams of knots, which provide a method of describing knots in terms of permutations in a symmetric group $S_{2n+1}$. We define two classes of moves on such permutations, called trivial petal additions and crossing…
We study pseudo-classical knots in the non-orientable thickening of a non-orientable surface, specifically knots that are orientation-preserving paths in a non-orientable $3$-manifold of the form (non-orientable surface) $\times$ $[0, 1]$.…
A compact 4-dimensional manifold is a non-singular graph-manifold if it can be obtained by the glueing T^2-bundles over compact surfaces (with boundary) of negative Euler characteristics. If none of glueing diffeomorphisms respect the…
Topological gauge theories in four dimensions which admit surface operators provide a natural framework for realizing homological knot invariants. Every such theory leads to an action of the braid group on branes on the corresponding moduli…
Charts are oriented labeled graphs in a disk. Any simple surface braid (2-dimensional braid) can be described by using a chart. Also, a chart represents an oriented closed surface (called a surface-link) embedded in 4-space. In this paper,…
Fintushel-Stern's knot surgery gave many pairs of exotic manifolds, which are homeomorphic but non-diffeomorphic. We show that if an elliptic fibration has two parallel, oppositely oriented vanishing circles (for example $S^2\times S^2$ or…
A chord diagram is a circle with paired points with each pair of points connected by a chord. Every generic immersed spherical curve provides a chord diagram by associating each chord with two preimages of a double point. Any two spherical…
We extend the notion of (smooth) stable generalized complex structures to allow for an anticanonical section with normal self-crossing singularities. This weakening not only allows for a number of natural examples in higher dimensions but…
The topology of symplectic 4-manifolds is related to that of singular plane curves via the concept of branched covers. Thus, various classification problems concerning symplectic 4-manifolds can be reformulated as questions about singular…
In this paper we present the Braid Monodromy Type (BMT) of curves and surfaces; past, present and future. The BMT is an invariant that can distinguish between non-isotopic curves; between different families of surfaces of general type;…
It is known that every compact Stein 4-manifolds can be embedded into a simply connected, minimal, closed, symplectic 4-manifold. By using this property, we discuss a new method of constructing corks. This method generates a large class of…
We prove that, under a simple condition on the cohomology ring, every closed 4-manifold has mod 2 Seiberg-Witten simple type. This result shows that there exists a large class of topological 4-manifolds such that all smooth structures have…
In this paper we prove several related results concerning smooth $\Z_p$ or $\s^1$ actions on 4-manifolds. We show that there exists an infinite sequence of smooth 4-manifolds $X_n$, $n\geq 2$, which have the same integral homology and…
We calculate the Seiberg-Witten invariants of branched covers of prime degree, where the branch locus consists of embedded spheres. Aside from the formula itself, our calculations give rise to some new constraints on configurations of…
We generalize the idea of unknotting knots to Seifert surfaces. We define an operation called ribbon twist which serves as the equivalent of a crossing change for knots. A Seifert surface is considered untwisted, the equivalent to…
Let $X$ be a connected compact 3-manifold with non-empty boundary. Consider the boundary $M$ of $X\times D^2$. $M$ is a 4-dimensional closed manifold and has the same fundamental group as $X$. Various examples of $X$ are known for which a…
We give a new characterization of symplectic surfaces in CP^2 via bridge trisections. Specifically, a minimal genus surface in CP^2 is smoothly isotopic to a symplectic surface if and only if it is smoothly isotopic to a surface in…
We discuss an obstruction to a knot being smoothly slice that comes from minimum-genus bounds on smoothly embedded surfaces in definite 4-manifolds. As an example, we provide an alternate proof of the fact that the (2,1)-cable of the figure…
We give a survey of geometric approaches to the topological 4-dimensional surgery and 5-dimensional s-cobordism conjectures, with a focus on the study of surfaces in 4-manifolds. The geometric lemma underlying these conjectures is a…
It is shown that any finite list of smooth closed simply-connected 4-manifolds homeomorphic to a given one X can be obtained by removing a single compact contractible submanifold (or cork) from X, and then regluing it by powers of a…