Related papers: Flat connections at infinity on knot surgery manif…
It is well known that any three-manifold can be obtained by surgery on a framed link in $S^3$. Lickorish gave an elementary proof for the existence of the three-manifold invariants of Witten using a framed link description of the manifold…
The physical 3d $\mathcal{N}=2$ theory T[Y] was previously used to predict the existence of some 3-manifold invariants $\hat{Z}_{a}(q)$ that take the form of power series with integer coefficients, converging in the unit disk. Their radial…
The asymptotic expansion of quantum knot invariants in complex Chern-Simons theory gives rise to factorially divergent formal power series. We conjecture that these series are resurgent functions whose Stokes automorphism is given by a pair…
We show that refined Chern-Simons theory and large N duality can be used to study the refined topological string with and without branes. We derive the refined topological vertex of hep-th/0701156 and hep-th/0502061 from a link invariant of…
This is the first of a series of two technical papers devoted to the analysis of holonomy invariants in strict higher gauge theory with end applications in higher Chern--Simons theory. For a flat 2--connection, we define the 2-holonomy of…
Recently, there had been a great deal of interest in obtaining and describing of all kinds of knots in links in hydrodynamics, electrodynamics, non Abelian gauge field theories and gravity. Although knots and links are observables of the…
We study Maxwell-Chern-Simons theory in 2 noncommutative spatial dimensions and 1 temporal dimension. We consider a finite matrix model obtained by adding a linear boundary field which takes into account boundary fluctuations. The pure…
We give a characterization of flat affine connections on manifolds by means of a natural affine representation of the universal covering of the Lie group of diffeomorphisms preserving the connection. From the infinitesimal point of view,…
We use classical techniques to answer some questions raised by Daniele Celoria about almost-concordance of knots in arbitrary closed $3$-manifolds. We first prove that, given $Y^3 \neq S^3$, for any non-trivial element $g\in \pi_1(Y)$ there…
In this paper, we define a new algebro-geometric invariant of 3-manifolds resulting from the Dehn surgery along a hyperbolic knot complement in S^3. We establish a Casson type invariant for these 3-manifolds. In the last section, we…
We exhibit many examples of closed symplectic manifolds on which there is an autonomous Hamiltonian whose associated flow has no nonconstant periodic orbits (the only previous explicit example in the literature was the torus T^2n (n\geq 2)…
This paper is a survey of results obtained by the authors on the geometry of connections with totally skew-symmetric torsion on the following manifolds: almost complex manifolds with Norden metric, almost contact manifolds with B-metric and…
By a result of Eliashberg, every symplectic filling of a three-dimensional contact connected sum is obtained by performing a boundary connected sum on another symplectic filling. We prove a partial generalization of this result for…
Attaching a 2-handle to a genus two or greater boundary component of a 3-manifold is a natural generalization of Dehn filling a torus boundary component. We prove that there is an interesting relationship between an essential surface in a…
In this article we study Lefschetz fibration structures on knot surgery 4-manifolds obtained from an elliptic surface E(2) using Kanenobu knots $K$. As a result, we get an infinite family of simply connected mutually diffeomorphic…
We define a "sutured topological quantum field theory", motivated by the study of sutured Floer homology of product 3-manifolds, and contact elements. We study a rich algebraic structure of suture elements in sutured TQFT, showing that it…
A surgery classification theory is introduced for manifolds of bounded geometry up to quasi-isometry. The Borel conjecture for this theory is proven for flat Euclidean space.
A celebrated theorem of Kirby identifies the set of closed oriented connected 3-manifolds with the set of framed links in $S^3$ modulo two moves. We give a similar description for the set of knots (and more generally, boundary links) in…
N=2 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories are described in terms of a Hitchin system over a Riemann surface C. Focusing on strongly coupled Argyres-Douglas theories, we show that the corresponding flat bundle over C can be quantized such that…
We revisit and clarify some aspects of perturbative renormalization in pure Chern-Simons theory by means of a localization principle associated with an underlying supersymmetry. This perspective allows the otherwise perturbative one-loop…