Related papers: An Unexpected Rational Blowdown
Our previous papers introduce topological notions of normal crossings symplectic divisor and variety, show that they are equivalent, in a suitable sense, to the corresponding geometric notions, and establish a topological smoothability…
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…
A link in the 3-sphere is homotopically trivial, according to Milnor, if its components bound disjoint maps of disks in the 4-ball. This paper concerns the question of what spaces give rise to the same class of homotopically trivial links…
We introduce symplectic Calabi-Yau caps to obtain new obstructions to exact fillings. In particular, it implies that any exact filling of the standard unit cotangent bundle of a hyperbolic surface has vanishing first Chern class and has the…
In this paper, we show how regular convex 4-polytopes - the analogues of the Platonic solids in four dimensions - can be constructed from three-dimensional considerations concerning the Platonic solids alone. Via the Cartan-Dieudonne…
Classical canard explosion results in smooth systems require the vector field to be at least $C^3$, since canard cycles are created as the result of a Hopf bifurcation. The work on canards in nonsmooth, planar systems is recent and has thus…
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First we extend the notion of symplectic implosion to the category of quasi-Hamiltonian $K$-manifolds, where $K$ is a simply connected compact Lie group. The imploded cross-section of the double…
In terms of the gauged nonlinear $\sigma$-models, we describe some results and implications of solving the following problem: Given a smooth symplectic manifold as target space with a quasi-free Hamiltonian group action, perform the…
The topology of Stein surfaces and contact 3-manifolds is studied by means of handle decompositions. A simple characterization of homeomorphism types of Stein surfaces is obtained --- they correspond to open handlebodies with all handles of…
We study the thermodynamics of a class of four-dimensional black hole solutions arising from the compactification of a higher-curvature gravity theory featuring an infinite tower of Lovelock-type invariants. For planar horizons, we identify…
A geometric construction of Sullivan's Stiefel-Whitney homology classes of a real analytic variety $X$ is given by means of the conormal cycle of an embedding of $X$ in a smooth variety. We prove that the Stiefel-Whitney classes define…
We investigate rational homology cobordisms of 3-manifolds with non-zero first Betti number. This is motivated by the natural generalization of the slice-ribbon conjecture to multicomponent links. In particular we consider the problem of…
Our goal in this work is to develop aspects of Bialynicki-Birula and Morse-Bott theory that can be extended from the classical setting of smooth manifolds to that of complex analytic spaces with a holomorphic $\mathbb{C}^*$ action. We…
Inspired by pioneering work of Ky\^uya Masuda in the 1980s, only much more recent PDE studies address global boundedness versus finite-time blow-up in complex time. The two phenomena are related by passage from real to purely imaginary…
We describe a procedure to construct infinite sets of pairwise smoothly inequivalent 2-spheres in simply connected 4-manifolds, which are topologically isotopic and whose complement has a prescribed fundamental group that satisfies some…
We compactify the moduli stack of maps from curves to certain quotient stacks $\mathcal{X}=[W/G]$ with a projective good moduli space, extending previous results from quasimap theory. For doing so, we introduce a new birational…
We adapt algorithms for resolving the singularities of complex algebraic varieties to prove that the natural map of homology theories from complex bordism to the bordism theory of complex derived orbifolds splits. In equivariant stable…
Many geometry processing pipelines implicitly assume their input data is a manifold, or is sampled from one, with a unique tangent plane at every point. Geometric data, however, routinely contains sharp features like edges, corners,…
We apply Zhang's almost K\"ahler Nakai-Moishezon theorem and Li-Zhang's comparison of $J$-symplectic cones to establish a stability result for the symplectomorphism group of a rational $4$-manifold $M$ with Euler number up to $12$. As a…
A rational normal scroll structure on an $(n+1)$-dimensional manifold $M$ is defined as a field of rational normal scrolls of degree $n-1$ in the projectivised cotangent bundle $\mathbb{P}T^*M$. We show that geometry of this kind naturally…