Related papers: Cubiquitous Lattices and Branched Covers bounding …
We determine which integral surgeries on a large class of circular chain links bound rational homology balls. Our key tool is the lattice-theoretic cubiquity obstruction recently developed by Greene and Owens. We discuss a practical method…
We study the problem of desingularizing coassociative conical singularities via gluing, allowing for topological and analytic obstructions, and discuss applications. This extends the author's earlier work on the unobstructed case. We…
We show that any knot which is smoothly the closure of a 3-braid cannot be Lagrangian concordant to and from the maximum Thurston-Bennequin Legendrian unknot except the unknot itself. Our obstruction comes from drawing the Weinstein…
Some ball-quotient orbifolds are related by covering maps. We exploit these coverings to find infinite towers of orbifolds uniformized by the complex 2-ball and some orbifolds over K3 surfaces uniformized by the 2-ball. Corresponding…
The embeddability of graphs into surfaces has been studied for nearly a century. While the complete set of topological obstructions is known for the sphere and the real projective plane, there are only partial results for the torus. Here we…
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…
Cubical rectangles are being defined and explored here over the $n-$dimensional geometric cube $Q_n.$ They form a new class of geometric objects that includes all the edges and all the squares of the $n-$cube. We enumerate and characterize…
We determine the algebraic and transcendental lattices of a general cubic fourfold with a symplectic automorphism of prime order. We prove that cubic fourfolds admitting a symplectic automorphism of order at least three are rational, and we…
This is a survey of the geometry of complex cubic fourfolds with a view toward rationality questions. Topics include classical constructions of rational examples, Hodge structures and special cubic fourfolds, associated K3 surfaces and…
Lattices induced by coverings arise naturally in matroid theory and combinatorial optimization, providing a structured framework for analyzing relationships between independent sets and closures. In this paper, we explore the structural…
Prime power fold cyclic branched covers along smoothly slice knots all bound rational homology balls. This phenomenon, however, does not characterize slice knots. In this paper, we give a new construction of non-slice knots that have the…
Motivated by Akbulut-Larson's construction of Brieskorn spheres bounding rational homology 4-balls, we explore plumbed 3-manifolds that bound rational homology circles and use them to construct infinite families of rational homology…
Given a finite CW complex $K$, we use a version of the Goodwillie-Weiss tower to formulate an obstruction theory for embedding $K$ into a Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^d$. For $2$-dimensional complexes in $\mathbb{R}^4$, a geometric analogue…
In this article, we completely classify torus bundles over the circle that bound 4-manifolds with the rational homology of the circle. Along the way, we classify certain integral surgeries along chain links that bound rational homology…
We study the rationality of some geometrically rational three-dimensional conic and quadric surface bundles, defined over the reals and more general real closed fields, for which the real locus is connected and the intermediate Jacobian…
When does the double cover of the three-sphere branched along an alternating link bound a rational homology ball? Heegaard Floer homology generates a necessary condition for it to bound: the link's chessboard lattice must be cubiquitous,…
Let L be a nonunimodular definite lattice. Using a theorem of Elkies we show that whether L embeds in the standard definite lattice of the same rank is completely determined by a collection of lattice correction terms, one for each…
Whitehead doubles provide a plethora of examples of knots that are topologically slice but not smoothly slice. We discuss the problem of the Whitehead double of the Figure 8 knot and survey commonly used techniques to obstructing sliceness.…
This note gives a uniform, self-contained, and fairly direct approach to a variety of obstruction-theoretic problems on 8-manifolds. We give necessary and sufficient cohomological critera for the existence of almost complex and almost…
We analyze the Brauer-Manin obstruction to rational points on the K3 surfaces over $\mathbb{Q}$ given by double covers of $\mathbb{P}^2$ ramified over a diagonal sextic. After finding an explicit set of generators for the geometric Picard…