Related papers: Toric multisections and curves in rational surface…
We introduce multisections of smooth, closed 4-manifolds, which generalize trisections to decompositions with more than three pieces. This decomposition describes an arbitrary smooth, closed 4-manifold as a sequence of cut systems on a…
We study smooth isotopy classes of complex curves in complex surfaces from the perspective of the theory of bridge trisections, with a special focus on curves in $\mathbb{CP}^2$ and $\mathbb{CP}^1\times\mathbb{CP}^1$. We are especially…
In this paper, we develop new techniques for understanding surfaces in $\mathbb{CP}^2$ via bridge trisections. Trisections are a novel approach to smooth 4-manifold topology, introduced by Gay and Kirby, that provide an avenue to apply…
Let (M,\omega) be a four dimensional compact connected symplectic manifold. We prove that (M,\omega) admits only finitely many inequivalent Hamiltonian effective 2-torus actions. Consequently, if M is simply connected, the number of…
We prove that every symplectic 4-manifold admits a trisection that is compatible with the symplectic structure in the sense that the symplectic form induces a Weinstein structure on each of the three sectors of the trisection. Along the…
An upper bound is obtained on the rank of a torus which can act smoothly and effectively on a smooth, closed, simply connected, rationally elliptic manifold. In the maximal-rank case, the manifolds admitting such actions are classified up…
Given a symplectic manifold, we ask in how many different ways can a torus act on it. Classification theorems in equivariant symplectic geometry can sometimes tell that two Hamiltonian torus actions are inequivalent, but often they do not…
We demonstrate that graphs embedded on surfaces are a powerful and practical tool to generate, characterize and simulate networks with a broad range of properties. Remarkably, the study of topologically embedded graphs is non-restrictive…
Bridge multisections are combinatorial descriptions of surface links in 4-space using tuples of trivial tangles. They were introduced by Islambouli, Karimi, Lambert-Cole, and Meier to study curves in rational surfaces. In this paper, we…
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 prove necessary and sufficient conditions for a smooth surface in a 4-manifold X to be pseudoholomorphic with respect to some almost complex structure on X. This provides a systematic approach to the construction of pseudoholomorphic…
A multisection of a 4-manifold is a decomposition into 1-handlebodies intersecting pairwise along 3-dimensional handlebodies or along a central closed surface; this generalizes the Gay-Kirby trisections. We show how to compute the twisted…
This is a slightly altered version of the authors thesis from 2014. In the first main part we show that the quotient space of a compact, simply connected and nonnegatively curved Riemannian 4-manifold by an effective, isometric…
Given an ordered sequence of $N$-choose-2 integers, we give necessary and sufficient conditions to have an ordered collection of $N$ simple closed curves on a torus such that the algebraic pairwise intersections of those curves are the…
In this paper we introduce a technique, called rim surgery, which can change a smooth embedding of an orientable surface of positive genus and nonnegative self-intersection in a smooth 4-manifold while leaving the topological embedding…
In this paper we will show that two surfaces of the same genus and homology class in a simply connected 4-manifold are concordant. We will show they are often topologically isotopic when their complements have cyclic fundamental group.…
A manifold obtained by k simultaneous symplectic blow-ups of CP^2 of equal sizes epsilon (where the size of CP^1 in CP^2 is one) admits an effective two-dimensional torus action if k <= 3. We show that it does not admit such an action if k…
Let a torus act on a compact oriented manifold $M$ with isolated fixed points, with an additional mild assumption that its isotropy submanifolds are orientable. We associate a signed labeled multigraph encoding the fixed point data (weights…
We prove that if a closed, smooth, simply-connected 4-manifold with a circle action admits an almost non-negatively curved sequence of invariant Riemannian metrics, then it also admits a non-negatively curved Riemannian metric invariant…
We show that two properly embedded compact surfaces in an orientable 4-manifold are cobordant if and only if they are $\mathbb{Z}/2$-homologous and either the 4-manifold has boundary or the surfaces have the same normal Euler number. If the…