Related papers: Covering moves and Kirby calculus

For an oriented surface link $S$, we can take a satellite construction called a 2-dimensional braid over $S$, which is a surface link in the form of a covering over $S$. We demonstrate that 2-dimensional braids over surface links are useful…

Let $Y_-$ and $Y_+$ be two compact 3-manifolds with empty or toroidal boundary. A 4-dimensional ribbon homology cobordism is a homologically trivial cobordism built with 1-handles and 2-handles. In this note, following the work of Friedl…

We offer a new proof that two closed oriented 4-manifolds are cobordant if their signatures agree, in the spirit of Lickorish's proof that all closed oriented 3-manifolds bound 4-manifolds. Where Lickorish uses Heegaard splittings we use…

We study the effect of Nielsen moves and their geometric counterparts, handle slides, on good boundary links. A collection of links, universal for 4-dimensional surgery, is shown to admit Seifert surfaces with trivial Lagrangian. They are…

This paper continues the study of decompositions of a smooth 4-manifold into two handlebodies with handles of index $\leq2$. Part I gave existence results in terms of spines and chain complexes over the fundamental group of the ambient…

We study the existence of geometrically controlled branched covering maps from $\mathbb R^3$ to open $3$-manifolds or to decomposition spaces $\mathbb S^3/G$, and from $\mathbb S^3/G$ to $\mathbb S^3$.

In this thesis, we develop the theory of bifibrations of polycategories. We start by studying how to express certain categorical structures as universal properties by generalising the shape of morphism. We call this phenomenon…

Let $(M,\xi)$ be a contact 3-manifold. We present two new algorithms, the first of which converts an open book $(\Sigma,\Phi)$ supporting $(M,\xi)$ with connected binding into a contact surgery diagram. The second turns a contact surgery…

We study the realizations of certain braided vector spaces of rack type as Yetter-Drinfeld modules over a cosemisimple Hopf algebra $H$. We apply the strategy developed in arXiv:1212.5279 to compute their liftings and use these results to…

Shapes of four dimensional spaces can be studied effectively via maps to standard surfaces. We explain, and illustrate by quintessential examples, how to simplify such generic maps on 4-manifolds topologically, in order to derive simple…

S-folds are generalizations of orientifolds in type IIB string theory, such that the geometric identifications are accompanied by non-trivial S-duality transformations. They were recently used by Garcia-Etxebarria and Regalado to provide…

We study 4-dimensional homology cobordisms without 3-handles, showing that they interact nicely with Thurston geometries, character varieties, and instanton and Heegaard Floer homologies. Using these, we derive obstructions to such…

We show that every closed connected non-orientable PL $4$-manifold $X$ is a simple branched covering of $\RP^4$. We also show that $X$ is a simple branched covering of the twisted $S^3$-bundle $S^1 \simtimes S^3$ if and only if the first…

A handlebody-link is a disjoint union of embeddings of handlebodies in $S^3$ and an HL-homotopy is an equivalence relation on handlebody-links generated by self-crossing changes. The second author and Ryo Nikkuni classified the set of…

Braided embeddings are embeddings to a product disc bundle so the projection to the first factor is a branched cover. In this paper, we study which branched covers lift to braided embeddings, which is a generalization of the Borsuk-Ulam…

We introduce the bicategory of bialgebras with coverings (which can be thought of as coalgebra-indexed families of morphisms), and provide a motivating application to the transfer of formulas for primitives and antipode. Additionally, we…

We study smooth, proper embeddings of noncompact surfaces in 4-manifolds, focusing on exotic planes and annuli, i.e., embeddings pairwise homeomorphic to the standard embeddings of R^2 and R^2-int D^2 in R^4. We encounter two uncountable…

We discuss 3-manifolds which are cyclic coverings of the 3-sphere, branched over 2-bridge knots and links. Different descriptions of these manifolds are presented: polyhedral, Heegaard diagram, Dehn surgery and coloured graph constructions.…

We exhibit new examples of double Kodaira fibrations by using finite Galois covers of a product $\Sigma_b \times \Sigma_b$, where $\Sigma_b$ is a smooth projective curve of genus $b \geq 2$. Each cover is obtained by providing an explicit…

Let K be a knot in an integral homology 3-sphere and let B denote the 2-fold branched cover of the integral homology sphere branched along K. We construct a map from the slice of characters with trace free along meridians in the SL(2,…