Related papers: Not all knots are smoothly round handle slice
The trace of $n$-framed surgery on a knot in $S^3$ is a 4-manifold homotopy equivalent to the 2-sphere. We characterise when a generator of the second homotopy group of such a manifold can be realised by a locally flat embedded 2-sphere…
A knot K in the 3-sphere is superslice if there is a slice disk D in the 4-ball such that the double of D along K is the unknotted 2-sphere S in $S^4$. Answering a question of Livingston-Meier, we find smoothly slice (in fact doubly slice)…
We use the famous knot-theoretic consequence of Freedman's disc theorem---knots with trivial Alexander polynomial bound a locally-flat disc in the 4-ball---to prove the following generalization. The degree of the Alexander polynomial of a…
A knot is said to be slice if it bounds a smooth properly embedded disk in the 4-ball. We demonstrate that the Conway knot, 11n34 in the Rolfsen tables, is not slice. This completes the classification of slice knots under 13 crossings, and…
As proved by Hedden and Ording, there exist knots for which the Ozsvath-Szabo and Rasmussen smooth concordance invariants, tau and s, differ. The Hedden-Ording examples have nontrivial Alexander polynomials and are not topologically slice.…
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.…
The A-polynomial of a knot is defined in terms of SL(2,C) representations of the knot group, and encodes information about essential surfaces in the knot complement. In 2005, Dunfield-Garoufalidis and Boyer-Zhang proved that it detects the…
The primary objects of study in the ``knot theory of complex plane curves'' are C-links: links (or knots) cut out of a 3-sphere in the complex plane by complex plane transverse and totally tangential. Transverse C-links are naturally…
Under certain homological hypotheses on a compact 4-manifold, we prove exactness of the topological surgery sequence at the stably smoothable normal invariants. The main examples are the class of finite connected sums of 4-manifolds with…
A theorem of Kronheimer and Mrowka states that Khovanov homology is able to detect the unknot. That is, if a knot has the Khovanov homology of the unknot, then it is equivalent to it. Similar results hold for the trefoils and the…
We show that, for each integer n, there exist infinitely many pairs of n-framed knots representing homeomorphic but non-diffeomorphic (Stein) 4-manifolds, which are the simplest possible exotic 4-manifolds regarding handlebody structures.…
Frame-spun knots are constructed by spinning a knot of lower dimension about a framed submanifold of S^n. We show that all frame-spun knots are slice (null-cobordant).
For a knot $K,$ a slope $r$ is said to be characterizing if for no other knot $J$ does $r$-framed surgery along $J$ yield the same manifold as $r$-framed surgery on $K.$ Applying a condition of Baker and Motegi, we show that the knots…
By examining the homology groups of a 4-manifold associated to an integral surgery on a knot $K$ in a rational homology 3-sphere $Y$ yielding a rational homology 3-sphere $Y^*$ with surgery dual knot $K^*$, we show that the subgroups…
The main result is that an s-cobordism (topological or smooth) of 4-manifolds has a product structure outside a ``core'' sub s-cobordism. These cores are arranged to have quite a bit of structure, for example they are smooth and abstractly…
We prove that for any integer $n$ there exist infinitely many different knots in $S^3$ such that $n$-surgery on those knots yields the same 3-manifold. In particular, when $|n|=1$ homology spheres arise from these surgeries. This answers…
Given a link L in the 3-sphere, we ask whether the components of L bound disjoint, nullhomologous disks properly embedded in a simply-connected positive-definite smooth 4-manifold; the knot case has been studied extensively in work of…
Among the knots that are the connected sum of two torus knots with cobordism distance 1, we characterize those that have 4-dimensional clasp number at least 2, and we show that their n-fold connected self-sum has 4-dimensional clasp number…
We show that there exists a link with 2 components which is not smoothly slice in $\mathbb{CP}^2 \# \overline{\mathbb{CP}^2}$. By contrast, it is well-known that every knot (i.e., link with 1 component) is smoothly slice therein. Our proof…
Given a band sum of a split two-component link along a nontrivial band, we obtain a family of knots indexed by the integers by adding any number of full twists to the band. We show that the knots in this family have the same Heegaard knot…