Related papers: Bar-Natan skein lasagna modules and exotic surface…

In a recent breakthrough, Ren and Willis gave the first analysis-free proof of the existence of exotic compact, orientable 4-manifolds; their main tool is the Khovanov skein lasagna module defined by Morrison, Walker, and Wedrich. In this…

The skein lasagna module is an extension of Khovanov-Rozansky homology to the setting of a four-manifold and a link in its boundary. This invariant plays the role of the Hilbert space of an associated fully extended (4+epsilon)-dimensional…

We construct analogs of Khovanov-Jacobsson classes and the Rasmussen invariant for links in the boundary of any smooth oriented 4-manifold. The main tools are skein lasagna modules based on equivariant and deformed versions of…

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…

Skein lasagna modules are a recent tool developed for the study of 4-manifolds. We provide general formula for 1-, 2-, and 3-handle attachments for skein modules defined with any functorial link theory in $S^3 \times I$ generalizing…

We introduce a new skein module for three manifolds based on properly embedded surfaces and their relations introduced by D.Bar-Natan, and modified by M.Khovanov. We compute the structure of the modules for some manifolds, including Seifert…

This survey reviews recent advances connecting link homology theories to invariants of smooth 4-manifolds and extended topological quantum field theories. Starting from joint work with Morrison and Walker, I explain how functorial link…

We extend the skein lasagna theory of Morrison-Walker-Wedrich to 4-manifolds with corners and formulate gluing formulas for 4-manifolds with boundary and, more generally, with corners. As an application, we develop a categorical framework…

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…

We construct a mixed invariant of non-orientable surfaces from the Lee and Bar-Natan deformations of Khovanov homology and use it to distinguish pairs of surfaces bounded by the same knot, including some exotic examples.

We introduce a new diffeomorphism invariant of smooth compact oriented 4-manifolds $X$ with a framed oriented 1-link $L$ in the boundary, where $L$ may be the empty set, and call it {\it Khovanov-Lipshitz-Sarkar skein lasagna homotopy type}…

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…

Morrison, Walker, and Wedrich used the blob complex to construct a generalization of Khovanov-Rozansky homology to links in the boundary of a 4-manifold. The degree zero part of their theory, called the skein lasagna module, admits an…

We show that the cobordism maps on Khovanov homology can distinguish smooth surfaces in the 4-ball that are exotically knotted (i.e., isotopic through ambient homeomorphisms but not ambient diffeomorphisms). We develop new techniques for…

In this brief note, we show that there exist smooth 4-manifolds (with nonempty boundary) containing pairs of exotically knotted 2-spheres that remain exotic after one (either external or internal) stabilization. It follows that the ``one is…

We give a short exposition of Ren and Willis's analysis-free proof of the existence of exotic compact, orientable 4-manifolds. There are two distinguishing features of our exposition. First, we avoid skein lasagna modules; we use Beliakova…

This paper investigates the exotic phenomena exhibited by links of disconnected surfaces with boundary that are properly embedded in the 4-ball. Our main results provide two different constructions of exotic pairs of surface links that are…

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 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 use Khovanov-Rozansky gl(N) link homology to define invariants of oriented smooth 4-manifolds, as skein modules constructed from certain 4-categories with well-behaved duals. The technical heart of this construction is a proof of the…