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

We classify topological $4$-manifolds with boundary and fundamental group $\mathbb{Z}$, under some assumptions on the boundary. We apply this to classify surfaces in simply-connected $4$-manifolds with $S^3$ boundary, where the fundamental…

We show that, given $d \geq 4$ and two closed connected oriented PL $4$-manifolds $M$ and $N$ such that $N$ has a handle decomposition with no $1$- and $3$-handles, there exists a $d$-fold simple branched covering $p \colon M \darrow{d} N$…

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…

This is a collection of notes on embedding problems for 3-manifolds. The main question explored is `which 3-manifolds embed smoothly in the 4-sphere?' The terrain of exploration is the Burton/Martelli/Matveev/Petronio census of triangulated…

In this paper, we make use of the relations between the braid and mapping class groups of a compact, connected, non-orientable surface N without boundary and those of its orientable double covering S to study embeddings of these groups and…

It is known that an automorphism of $F_g$, the oriented closed surface of genus $g$, is extendable over the 4-sphere $S^4$ if and only if it has a bounding invariant spin structure \cite{WsWz}. We show that each automorphism of $F_g$ has an…

Classes of branched surfaces extend the classes of surfaces or 2-dimensional manifolds satisfying suitable properties and defined in various manners. Reeb spaces of smooth maps of suitable classes into surfaces whose codimensions are…

Let $W$ be a compact smooth $4$-manifold that deformation retract to a PL embedded closed surface. One can arrange the embedding to have at most one non-locally-flat point, and near the point the topology of the embedding is encoded in the…

If $\mathcal E, \mathcal F$ are vector bundles of ranks $r-1,r$ on a smooth fourfold $X$ and $\mathcal{Hom}(\mathcal E,\mathcal F)$ is globally generated, it is well known that the general map $\phi: \mathcal E \to \mathcal F$ is injective…

We generalize the familiar notions of overtwistedness and Giroux torsion in 3-dimensional contact manifolds, defining an infinite hierarchy of local filling obstructions called planar torsion, whose integer-valued order $k \ge 0$ can be…

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…

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…

For several instances of metric largeness like enlargeability or having hyperspherical universal covers, we construct non-large vector subspaces in the rational homology of finitely generated groups. The functorial properties of this…

We study neighborhoods of configurations of symplectic surfaces in symplectic 4-manifolds. We show that suitably `positive' configurations have neighborhoods with concave boundaries and we explicitly describe open book decompositions of the…

A smooth embedding of a closed $3$-manifold $M$ in $\mathbb{R}^4$ may generically be composed with projection to the fourth coordinate to determine a Morse function on $M$ and hence a Heegaard splitting $M=X\cup_\Sigma Y$. However, starting…

We construct infinitely many smooth oriented 4-manifolds containing pairs of homotopic, smoothly embedded 2-spheres that are not topologically isotopic, but that are equivalent by an ambient diffeomorphism inducing the identity on homology.…

The purpose of this note is to scrutinize the proof of Burago and Zalgaller regarding the existence of $PL$ isometric embeddings of $PL$ compact surfaces into $\mathbb{R}^3$. We conclude that their proof does not admit a direct extension to…

We classify four-dimensional compact solvmanifolds up to diffeomorphism, while determining which of them have complex analytic structures. In particular, we shall see that a four-dimensional compact solvmanifold S can be written, up to…

We have been interested in understanding the class of 7-dimensional closed and simply-connected manifolds in geometric and constructive ways. We have constructed explicit fold maps, which are higher dimensional versions of Morse functions,…

Finite presentations for the mapping class group M(F) are known for arbitrary orientable compact surface F. If F is non-orientable, then such presentations are known only when F has genus at most 3 and few boundary components. In this paper…