Related papers: Ribbon cobordisms as a partial order
We show that ribbon rational homology cobordism is a partial order within the class of irreducible 3-manifolds. This makes essential use of the methods recently employed by Ian Agol to show that ribbon knot concordance is a partial order.
Agol proved that ribbon concordance forms a partial ordering on the set of knots in the $3$-sphere. In this paper, we prove that all tight fibered knots are minimal in this partially ordered set. We also give the table of prime minimal…
In this note we show that ribbon concordance forms a partial ordering on the set of knots, answering a question of Gordon. The proof makes use of representation varieties of the knot groups to $SO(N)$ and relations between them induced by a…
Ribbon concordances between knots generalize the notion of ribbon knots. Agol, building on work of Gordon, proved ribbon concordance gives a partial order on knots in $S^3$. In previous work, the author and Greene conjectured that positive…
We give simple homological conditions for a rational homology 3-sphere Y to have infinite order in the rational homology cobordism group, and for a collection of rational homology spheres to be linearly independent. These translate…
We investigate rational homology cobordisms of 3-manifolds with non-zero first Betti number. This is motivated by the natural generalization of the slice-ribbon conjecture to multicomponent links. In particular we consider the problem of…
We consider the question of when a rational homology 3-sphere is rational homology cobordant to a connected sum of lens spaces. We prove that every rational homology cobordism class in the subgroup generated by lens spaces is represented by…
We determine when there exists a ribbon rational homology cobordism between two connected sums of lens spaces, i.e. one without $3$-handles. In particular, we show that if a lens space $L$ admits a ribbon rational homology cobordism to a…
We present three large families of new examples of plumbed 3-manifolds that bound rational homology 4-balls. These are constructed using two operations, also defined here, that preserve the lack of a lattice embedding obstruction to…
We give a complete classification of the spherical 3-manifolds that bound smooth rational homology 4-balls. Furthermore, we determine the order of spherical 3-manifolds in the rational homology cobordism group of rational homology…
In this survey, we present most recent highlights from the study of the homology cobordism group, with a particular emphasis on its long-standing and rich history in the context of smooth manifolds. Further, we list various results on its…
This paper and its sequel prove that every Legendrian knot in a closed three-manifold with a contact form has a Reeb chord. The present paper deduces this result from another theorem, asserting that an exact symplectic cobordism between…
Boyer, Gordon, and Watson have conjectured that an irreducible rational homology 3-sphere is an L-space if and only if its fundamental group is not left-orderable. Since Dehn surgeries on knots in $S^3$ can produce large families of…
We classify connected sums of three-dimensional lens spaces which smoothly bound rational homology balls. We use this result to determine the order of each lens space in the group of rational homology 3-spheres up to rational homology…
We determine the smooth concordance order of the 3-stranded pretzel knots P(p,q,r) with p,q,r odd. We show that each one of finite order is, in fact, ribbon, thereby proving the slice-ribbon conjecture for this family of knots. As…
We study 3-braid knots of finite smooth concordance order. A corollary of our main result is that a chiral 3-braid knot of finite concordance order is ribbon.
We describe an action of the concordance group of knots in the three-sphere on concordances of knots in arbitrary 3-manifolds. As an application we define the notion of almost-concordance between knots. After some basic results, we prove…
In this paper we define and investigate Z/2-homology cobordism invariants of Z/2-homology 3-spheres which turn out to be related to classical invariants of knots. As an application we show that many lens spaces have infinite order in the…
For each rational homology 3-sphere $Y$ which bounds simply connected definite 4-manifolds of both signs, we construct an infinite family of irreducible rational homology 3-spheres which are homology cobordant to $Y$ but cannot bound any…
The following is a long-standing open question: "If the zero-framed surgeries on two knots in the 3-sphere are integral homology cobordant, are the knots themselves concordant?" We show that an obvious rational version of this question has…