Related papers: Knotted contractible 4-manifolds in the 4-sphere

There is an infinitely generated free subgroup of the smooth knot concordance group with the property that no nontrivial element in this subgroup can be represented by an alternating knot. This subgroup has the further property that every…

For any smooth manifold $M$ of dimension $d\geq4$ we construct explicit classes in homotopy groups of spaces of embeddings of either an arc or a circle into $M$, in every degree that is a multiple of $d-3$, and show that they are detected…

A crucial step in the surgery-theoretic program to classify smooth manifolds is that of representing a middle--dimensional homology class by a smoothly embedded sphere. This step fails even for the simple 4-manifolds obtained from the…

In [HT], two of us constructed a closed oriented 4-dimensional manifold with fundamental group $\Z$ that does not split off $S^1\times S^3$. In this note we show that this 4-manifold, and various others derived from it, do not admit smooth…

We study knots in $\mathbb{S}^3$ obtained by the intersection of a minimal surface in $\mathbb{R}^4$ with a small 3-sphere centered at a branch point. We construct examples of new minimal knots. In particular we show the existence of…

An invariant of orientable 3-manifolds is defined by taking the minimum $n$ such that a given 3-manifold embeds in the connected sum of $n$ copies of $S^2 \times S^2$, and we call this $n$ the embedding number of the 3-manifold. We give…

We prove that hyperbolic 2-bridge knots are determined amongst all compact 3-manifolds by the profinite completions of their knot groups.

Let $X$ be a closed indefinite $4$-manifold with $b_+(X) = 3 \; ({\rm mod} \; 4)$ and with non-vanishing mod $2$ Seiberg--Witten invariants. We prove a new lower bound on the genus of a properly embedded surface in $X \setminus B^4$…

We show that there exist hyperbolic knots in the 3-sphere such that the set of points of large injectivity radius in the complement take up the bulk of the volume. More precisely, given a finite volume hyperbolic manifold, for any bound R>0…

We show that if a simply connected manifold is almost quarter pinched then it is diffeomorphic to a CROSS (a compact rank one symmetric space) or a sphere.

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…

We discuss an "extrinsic" property of knots in a 3-subspace of the 3-sphere $S^3$ to characterize how the subspace is embedded in $S^3$. Specifically, we show that every knot in a subspace of the 3-sphere is transient if and only if the…

We prove the long-standing Montesinos conjecture that any closed oriented PL 4-manifold M is a simple covering of S^4 branched over a locally flat surface (cf [J M Montesinos, 4-manifolds, 3-fold covering spaces and ribbons, Trans. Amer.…

We show that some hyperbolic 3-manifolds which are tessellated by copies of the regular ideal hyperbolic tetrahedron embed geodesically in a complete, finite volume, hyperbolic 4-manifold. This allows us to prove that the complement of the…

Using spinning we analyze in a geometric way Haefliger's smoothly knotted (4k-1)-spheres in the 6k-sphere. Consider the 2-torus standardly embedded in the 3-sphere, which is further standardly embedded in the 6-sphere. At each point of the…

We realize 4 of the 6 closed orientable flat 3-manifolds as a cusp section of an orientable finite-volume hyperbolic 4-manifold whose symmetry group acts transitively on the set of cusps.

We deduce that the fundamental groups of the orbit configuration spaces of an effective and properly discontinuous action of a discrete group on a connected aspherical 2-manifold, with isolated fixed points, fit into a four-term exact…

We show that the problem of determining whether a knot in the 3-sphere is non-trivial lies in NP. This is a consequence of the following more general result. The problem of determining whether the Thurston norm of a second homology class in…

We introduce a new generalization of Gompf nuclei and give applications. We construct infinitely many exotic smooth structures for a large class of compact 4-manifolds with boundary, regarding topological invariants. We prove that a large…

We describe a collection of constructions which illustrate a panoply of ``exotic'' smooth 4-manifolds.