Related papers: Bridge trisections and Seifert solids

It is a consequence of theorems of Gordon-Reid [Tangle decompositions of tunnel number one knots and links, J. Knot Theory and its Ramifications, 4 (1995) 389-409] and Thompson [Thin position and bridge number for knots in the 3-sphere,…

We study the equivariant concordance classes of two-bridge knots, providing an easy formula to compute their butterfly polynomial, and we give two different proofs that no two-bridge knot is equivariantly slice. Finally, we introduce a new…

By use of a variety of techniques (most based on constructions of quasipositive knots and links, some old and others new), many smooth 3-manifolds are realized as transverse intersections of complex surfaces in complex 3-space with strictly…

We study the effect of Nielsen moves and their geometric counterparts, handle slides, on good boundary links. A collection of links, universal for 4-dimensional surgery, is shown to admit Seifert surfaces with trivial Lagrangian. They are…

The groups of link bordism can be identified with homotopy groups via the Pontryagin-Thom construction. B.J. Sanderson computed the bordism group of 3 component surface-links using the Hilton-Milnor Theorem, and later gave a geometric…

We show that the decision problem of recognising whether a triangulated 3-manifold admits a Seifert fibered structure with non-empty boundary is in NP. We also show that the problem of producing Seifert data for a triangulation of such a…

This paper looks at a class of closed orientable 3-manifolds constructed from a gluing of three handlebodies, such that the inclusion of each handlebody is $\pi_1$-injective. This construction is the generalisation to handlebodies of the…

We present several structural results on closed, nonorientable, smooth $4$--manifolds, extending analogous results and machinery for the orientable case. We prove the existence of simplified broken Lefschetz fibrations and simplified…

We compute the Ozsvath-Szabo Floer homologies HF^{+-} and HF-hat for three-manifolds obtained by integer surgery on a two-bridge knot.

In this thesis, we prove several results concerning field-theoretic invariants of knots and 3-manifolds. In Chapter 2, for any knot $K$ in a closed, oriented 3-manifold $M$, we use $SU(2)$ representation spaces and the Lagrangian field…

We provide obstructions to a link in $S^3$ arising as the cross section of any number of unlinked spheres in $S^4$. Our obstructions arise from the multivariable signature, the Blanchfield form and generalised Seifert matrices. We also…

Suppose M is a closed irreducible orientable 3-manifold, K is a knot in M, P and Q are bridge surfaces for K and K is not removable with respect to Q. We show that either Q is equivalent to P or $d(K,P) \leq 2-\chi(Q-K)$. If K is not a two…

We find all Heegaard diagrams with the property "alternating" or "weakly alternating" on a genus two orientable closed surface. Using these diagrams we give infinitely many genus two 3--manifolds, each admits an automorphism whose…

We investigate the question of when distinct branched surfaces in the complement of a 2-bridge knot support essential surfaces with identical boundary slopes. We determine all instances in which this occurs and identify an infinite family…

We show that every canonical Seifert surface is (up to isotopy) given by a knot diagram in which the (open) Seifert disks are pairwise disjoint.

Given a trivalent graph in the 3-dimensional Euclidean space, we call it a discrete surface because it has a tangent space at each vertex determined by its neighbor vertices. To abstract a continuum object hidden in the discrete surface, we…

Heegaard splittings stratify 3-manifolds by complexity; only $S^3$ admits a genus-zero splitting, and only $S^3$, $S^1 \times S^2$, and lens spaces $L(p,q)$ admit genus-one splittings. In dimension four, the second author and Jeffrey Meier…

We define a set of "second-order" L^(2)-signature invariants for any algebraically slice knot. These obstruct a knot's being a slice knot and generalize Casson-Gordon invariants, which we consider to be "first-order signatures". As one…

We show that any exceptional non-trivial Dehn surgery on a hyperbolic two-bridge knot yields a 3-manifold whose fundamental group is left-orderable. This gives a new supporting evidence for a conjecture of Boyer, Gordon and Watson.

For an oriented $4$--dimensional fiber bundle over $S^{1}$, we build a relative trisection from a sutured Heegaard splitting of the fiber. We provide an algorithm to explicitly construct the associated relative trisection diagram, from a…