Related papers: On the detection of knotted spheres by their trace…

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…

Let K be a knot in the 3-sphere. A slope p/q is said to be characterising for K if whenever p/q surgery on K is homeomorphic, via an orientation-preserving homeomorphism, to p/q surgery on another knot K' in the 3-sphere, then K and K' are…

In this paper, we construct infinitely many non-isotopic 3-knots in the 5-sphere, each of which has four critical points with respect to the standard height function of the 5-sphere. This contrasts with a theorem of Scharlemann which says…

We prove a localization theorem for exotic diffeomorphisms, showing that every diffeomorphism of a compact simply-connected 4-manifold that is isotopic to the identity after stabilizing with one copy of $S^2 \times S^2$, is smoothly…

Given a knot in $S^3$, one can associate to it a surface diffeomorphism in two different ways. First, an arbitrary knot in $S^{3}$ can be represented by braids, which can be thought of as diffeomorphisms of punctured disks. Second, if the…

We study the classification of slice disks of knots up to isotopy and diffeomorphism using an invariant in knot Floer homology. We compute the invariant of a slice disk obtained by deform-spinning, and show that it can be effectively used…

The unknot U in S^4 has non-unique smooth spanning 3-balls up to isotopy fixing U. Equivalently there are properly embedded non-separating 3-balls in S^1xB^3 not properly isotopic to 1xB^3. More generally there exist non-separating…

There has been a great deal of interest in understanding which knots are characterized by which of their Dehn surgeries. We study a 4-dimensional version of this question: which knots are determined by which of their traces? We prove…

We give a method for obtaining infinitely many framed knots which represent a diffeomorphic 4-manifold. We also study a relationship between the $n$-shake genus and the 4-ball genus of a knot. Furthermore we give a construction of homotopy…

We show that the smooth homotopy 4-sphere obtained by Gluck twisting the m-twist n-roll spin of any unknotting number one knot is diffeomorphic to the standard 4-sphere, for any pair of integers (m,n). It follows as a corollary that an…

The first and last named authors have demonstrated the existence of knots for which every integral slope is non-characterizing. In this short note, we extend this result in two ways. There exists a knot that shares for every integer n the…

Given a simply-connected closed 4-manifold $X$ and a smoothly embedded oriented surface $\Sigma$, various constructions based on Fintushel-Stern knot surgery have produced new surfaces in $X$ that are pairwise homeomorphic to $\Sigma$, but…

In this paper we clarify an issue in the knot surgery construction of Fintushel and Stern. Using knot surgery, they construct an infinite number of smooth structures on 4-manifolds satisfying certain conditions, but they do not explicitly…

We prove that any diffeomorphism of the sphere S^n to itself can be decomposed into bi-Lipschitz mappings of small isometric distortion and which move points a small amount in the spherical metric.

We consider the space of all smooth knots in the 3-sphere isotopic to a given knot, with the aim of finding a small subspace onto which this large space deformation retracts. For torus knots and many hyperbolic knots we show the subspace…

We classify nonnegatively curved simply connected 4-manifolds with circle symmetry up to equivariant diffeomorphisms. The main problem is rule out knotted curves in the singular set of the orbit space. As an extension of this work we…

In this article we prove that, if $X$ is a smooth $4$-manifold containing an embedded double node neighborhood, all knot surgery $4$-manifolds $X_K$ are mutually diffeomorphic to each other after a connected sum with $\mathbb{CP}^2$. Hence,…

Every stable 4-sphere is identified with the double branched covering space of a trivial surface-knot space. As a result of Wall, it is known that any two orthogonal bases of every stable 4-sphere are transformed into each other by an…

For a given smooth $2$-knot in $S^4$, we relate the existence of a smooth Seifert hypersurface of a certain class to the existence of irreducible $ SU(2)$-representations of its knot group. For example, we see that any smooth $2$-knot…

The purpose of this paper is to study geometrically simply-connected homotopy 4-spheres by analyzing $n$-component links with a Dehn surgery realizing $\#^n(S^1\times S^2)$. We call such links $n$R-links. Our main result is that a homotopy…