Related papers: Orthogonal 2-sphere basis of stable 4-sphere

Conjecturally, a knot is slice if and only if its positive Whitehead double is slice. We consider an analogue of this conjecture for slice disks in the four-ball: two slice disks of a knot are smoothly isotopic if and only if their positive…

Loi and Piergallini showed that a smooth compact, connected $4$-manifold $X$ with boundary admits a Stein structure if and only if $X$ is a simple branched cover of a $4$-disk $D^4$ branched along a positive braided surface $S$ in a bidisk…

We show that much of the structure of the 2-sphere as a complex curve survives the q-deformation and has natural generalizations to the quantum 2-sphere - which, with additional structures, we identify with the quantum projective line.…

We show that every quadrangulation of the sphere can be transformed into a $4$-cycle by deletions of degree-$2$ vertices and by $t$-contractions at degree-$3$ vertices. A $t$-contraction simultaneously contracts all incident edges at a…

We prove that every closed oriented smooth 4-manifold X admits a broken Lefschetz fibration (aka singular Lefschetz fibration) over the 2-sphere. Given any closed orientable surface F of square zero in X, we can choose the fibration so that…

We show that 4-dimensional conjugation manifolds are all obtained from branched 2-fold coverings of knotted surfaces in Z/2-homology 4-spheres.

In this note we provide natural optimal geometric conditions for a Riemannian manifold suitably covered by two open metric balls to be homeomorphic to a sphere. This can be viewed as a geometric analogue of Brown's theorem in topology…

By 2-twist-spinning the knotted graph that represents the knotted handlebody $5_2$, we obtain a knotted foam in 4-dimensional space with a non-trivial quandle cocycle invariant.

We give a topological interpretation of the core group invariant of a surface embedded in S^4. We show that the group is isomorphic to the free product of the fundamental group of the double branch cover of S^4 with the surface as a…

In earlier work, the authors introduced a conjecture which, for an orientation-preserving diffeomorphism $\varphi \colon S \to S$ of a surface, connects a certain quantum invariant of $\varphi$ with the hyperbolic volume of its mapping…

We consider a self-homeomorphism h of some surface S. A subset F of the fixed point set of h is said to be unlinked if there is an isotopy from the identity to h that fixes every point of F. With Le Calvez' transverse foliations theory in…

Choice of an appropriate (3+1)-foliation of spacetime or a (2+1)-foliation of the Cauchy space, leads often to a substantial simplification of various mathematical problems in General Relativity Theory. We propose a new method to construct…

We investigate analytic properties of the double Fourier sphere (DFS) method, which transforms a function defined on the two-dimensional sphere to a function defined on the two-dimensional torus. Then the resulting function can be written…

Gradient-like diffeomorphisms of a closed surface $M^2$ are characterized by a finite hyperbolic limit set and the absence of intersections of invariant manifolds of distinct saddle points. In the case where such diffeomorphisms $f_0,…

We prove that every distortion element in the group of diffeomorphisms of the 2-sphere which has some recurrent point that is not fixed is an irrational pseudo-rotation. Moreover we prove that the differential of a distortion element in the…

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 p be a saddle fixed point for an orientation-preserving surface diffeomorphism f admitting a homoclinic point q. Let V be an open 2-cell bounded by a simple loop formed by two arcs joining p to q lying respectively in the stable and…

We prove that for every natural number k there are simply connected topological four-manifolds which have at leat k distinct smooth structures supporting Einstein metrics, and also have infinitely many distinct smooth structures not…

In 2009, Calegari constructed smooth homotopy 4-spheres from monodromies of fibered knots. We prove that all these are diffeomorphic to the standard 4-sphere. Our method uses 5-dimensional handlebody techniques and results on mapping class…

We show that every smooth closed oriented four-manifold admits a decomposition into two co- dimension zero submanifolds with common boundary. Each of these submanifolds carries a structure of a symplectic manifold with pseudo-convex…