Related papers: Surfaces in 4-manifolds and extendible mapping cla…

We study the existence of incompressible embeddings of surfaces into the genus two handlebody. We show that for every compact surface with boundary, orientable or not, there is an incompressible embedding of the surface into the genus two…

We extend the theory of relative trisections of smooth, compact, oriented $4$-manifolds with connected boundary given by Gay and Kirby to include $4$-manifolds with an arbitrary number of boundary components. Additionally, we provide…

An invariant of orientable 3-manifolds is defined by taking the minimum $n$ such that a given 3-manifold embeds in the connected sum of $n$ copies of $S^2 \times S^2$, and we call this $n$ the embedding number of the 3-manifold. We give…

In this paper, we collect various structural results to determine when an integral homology $3$--sphere bounds an acyclic smooth $4$--manifold, and when this can be upgraded to a Stein manifold. In a different direction we study whether…

Techniques for constructing codimension 2 embeddings and immersions of the 2 and 3-fold branched covers of the 3 and 4-dimensional spheres are presented. These covers are in braided form, and it is in this sense that they are folded. More…

We show that for any connected smooth manifold $M$ of dimension different from $3$ the restriction of the compact-open topology to the diffeomorphism group of $M$ is minimal, i.e. the group does not admit a strictly coarser Hausdorff group…

Let M be a compact Sasakian manifold. We show that M admits a CR-embedding into a Sasakian manifold diffeomorphic to a sphere, and this embedding is compatible with the respective Reeb fields. We argue that a stronger embedding theorem…

For any infinite-type surface $S$, a natural question is whether the homology of its mapping class group contains any non-trivial classes that are supported on (i) a compact subsurface or (ii) a finite-type subsurface. Our purpose here is…

In [HT], two of us constructed a closed oriented 4-dimensional manifold with fundamental group $\Z$ that does not split off $S^1\times S^3$. In this note we show that this 4-manifold, and various others derived from it, do not admit smooth…

This paper concerns the class of contractible open 3-manifolds which are ``locally finite strong end sums'' of eventually end-irreducible Whitehead manifolds. It is shown that whenever a 3-manifold in this class is a covering space of…

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…

We construct infinite families of non-simply connected locally conformally flat (LCF) 4-manifolds realizing rich topological types. These manifolds have strictly negative scalar curvature and the underlying topological 4-manifolds do not…

We derive an obstruction to representing a homology class of a symplectic 4-manifold by an embedded, possibly disconnected, symplectic surface.

Let f, g be two homotopic smooth embeddings of a closed surface in a closed oriented 5-dimensional manifold. We show that if f admits a common algebraic dual 3-sphere, or if the fundamental group of the ambient space is trivial, then f and…

In this second paper of a two-part series, we prove that whenever a contact 3-manifold admits a uniform spinal open book decomposition with planar pages, its (weak, strong and/or exact) symplectic and Stein fillings can be classified up to…

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…

We consider finite-sheeted, regular, possibly branched covering spaces of compact surfaces with boundary and the associated liftable and symmetric mapping class groups. In particular, we classify when either of these subgroups coincides…

We define the class of high dimensional graph manifolds. These are compact smooth manifolds supporting a decomposition into finitely many pieces, each of which is diffeomorphic to the product of a torus with a finite volume hyperbolic…

A smooth map between manifolds is said to be \emph{image simple} if its restriction to its singular point set is a topological embedding. We study the parity of the number of connected components of the singular point set for image simple…

We study codimension $1$ embeddings preserving open book structures. In particular, we prove that every closed orientable 3-manifold admits a codimension-1 spun embedding in a finite connected sum of $S^2 \times S^2$s and $S^2…