Related papers: One stabilization is not enough for closed knotted…

In this paper, we study stable equivalence of exotically knotted surfaces in 4-manifolds, surfaces that are topologically isotopic but not smoothly isotopic. We prove that any pair of embedded surfaces in the same homology class become…

Internal stabilization adds a trivial handle to an embedded surface in a coordinate chart. It is known that any pair of smoothly knotted surfaces in a simply-connected $4$-manifold become smoothly isotopic after sufficiently many internal…

A result of Baykur-Sunukjian states that homologous surfaces in a 4-manifold become isotopic after a finite number of internal stabilizations, i.e. attaching tubes to the surfaces. A natural question is how many stabilizations are needed…

We construct an example of a cork that remains exotic after taking a connected sum with $S^2 \times S^2$. Combined with a work of Akbulut-Ruberman, this implies the existence of an exotic pair of contractible 4-manifolds which remains…

A pair of closed, smooth $4$-manifolds $M$ and $M'$ are stably exotic if they are stably homeomorphic but not stably diffeomorphic, where stabilisation refers to connected sum with copies of $S^2 \times S^2$. Orientable stable exotica do…

We find conditions under which a non-orientable closed surface S embedded into an orientable closed 4-manifold X can be represented by a connected sum of an embedded closed surface in X and an unknotted projective plane in a 4-sphere. This…

Wall-type stabilization problems investigate the collapse of exotic 4-dimensional phenomena under stabilization operations (e.g., taking connected sums with $S^2 \times S^2$). We propose an elementary approach to these problems, providing a…

Define the 1-handle stabilization distance between two surfaces properly embedded in a fixed 4-dimensional manifold to be the minimal number of 1-handle stabilizations necessary for the surfaces to become ambiently isotopic. For every…

In a small simply-connected closed 4-manifold, we construct infinitely many pairs of exotic codimension-$1$ submanifolds with diffeomorphic complements that remain exotic after any number of stabilizations by $ S^2 \times S^2$. We also give…

We show that many explicit examples of exotic pairs of surfaces in a smooth 4-manifold become smoothly isotopic after one external stabilization with $S^2\times S^2$ or $CP^2\#\overline{CP^2}$. Our results cover surfaces produced by…

We construct and study the skein lasagna module obtained by importing the Bar-Natan Khovanov homology package. For 4-manifolds satisfying a non-vanishing condition, we produce pairs of exotic surfaces (with boundary) by using the behavior…

We introduce a method to detect exotic surfaces without explicitly using a smooth 4-manifold invariant or an invariant of a 4-manifold-surface pair in the construction. Our main tools are two versions of families (Seiberg-Witten)…

We study smooth, proper embeddings of noncompact surfaces in 4-manifolds, focusing on exotic planes and annuli, i.e., embeddings pairwise homeomorphic to the standard embeddings of R^2 and R^2-int D^2 in R^4. We encounter two uncountable…

We compare two naturally arising notions of unknotting number for 2-spheres in the 4-sphere: namely, the minimal number of 1-handle stabilizations needed to obtain an unknotted surface, and the minimal number of Whitney moves required in a…

It is one of the most important facts in 4-dimensional topology that not every spherical homology class of a 4-manifold can be represented by an embedded sphere. In 1978, M. Freedman and R. Kirby showed that in the simply connected case,…

This paper studies properly embedded surfaces in the 4-ball that are exotically knotted (i.e., topologically but not smoothly isotopic), and leverages this local phenomenon to study surfaces in larger 4-manifolds. The main results provide a…

Any two homologous surfaces of the same genus embedded in a smooth 4-manifold X with simply-connected complements are shown to be smoothly isotopic in the connected sum of X and the product of a 2-sphere with itself, if the surfaces are…

Kronheimer-Mrowka recently proved that the Dehn twist along a 3-sphere in the neck of $K3\#K3$ is not smoothly isotopic to the identity. This provides a new example of self-diffeomorphisms on 4-manifolds that are isotopic to the identity in…

Some generalizations and variations of the Fintushel-Stern rim surgery are known to produce smoothly knotted surfaces. We show that if the fundamental groups of their complements are cyclic, then these surfaces are topologically unknotted.…

Given a simply-connected closed 4-manifold $X$ and a smoothly embedded oriented surface $\Sigma$, various constructions based on Fintushel-Stern knot surgery have produced new surfaces in $X$ that are pairwise homeomorphic to $\Sigma$, but…