Related papers: Links, two-handles, and four-manifolds
We consider closed acylindrical surfaces in 3-manifolds and in knot and link complements, and show that the genus of these surfaces is bounded linearly by the number of tetrahedra in the triangulation of the manifold and by the number of…
We give upper bounds of the Matveev complexities of two-bridge link complements by constructing their spines explicitly. In particular, we determine the complexities for an infinite sequence of two-bridge links corresponding to the…
We show that any smooth, closed, oriented, connected 4--manifold can be trisected into three copies of $\natural^k (S^1 \times B^3)$, intersecting pairwise in 3--dimensional handlebodies, with triple intersection a closed 2--dimensional…
An immersed concordance between two links is a concordance with possible self-intersections. Given an immersed concordance we construct a smooth four-dimensional cobordism between surgeries on links. By applying $d$-invariant inequalities…
This is primarily an exposition, combining work of several authors (Curtis, Hsiang, Freedman, Stong, Matveyev, and Bizaca), of the proof that a smooth 5-dimensional h-cobordism between simply connected 4-manifolds is a product off of a…
It is known by A. Loi and R. Piergallini that a closed, oriented, smooth 3-manifold is Stein fillable if and only if it has a positive open book decomposition. In the present paper we will show that for every link L in a Stein fillable…
A theorem of Kirby gives a necessary and sufficient condition for two framed links in S^3 to yield orientation-preserving diffeomorphic results of surgery. Kirby's theorem is an important method for constructing invariants of 3-manifolds.…
In this paper we give explicit, handle-by-handle constructions of concave symplectic fillings of all closed, oriented contact 3-manifolds. These constructions combine recent results of Giroux relating contact structures and open book…
We develop a version of Seiberg--Witten Floer cohomology/homotopy type for a spin$^c$ 4-manifold with boundary and with an involution which reverses the spin$^c$ structure, as well as a version of Floer cohomology/homotopy type for oriented…
In this paper, we first prove that any closed simply connected 4-manifold that admits a decomposition into two disk bundles of rank greater than 1 is diffeomorphic to one of the standard elliptic 4-manifolds: $\mathbb{S}^4$,…
We classify closed, topological spin$^+$ 4-manifolds with fundamental group $\pi$ of cohomological dimension $\leq 3$ (up to s-cobordism), after stabilization by connected sum with at most $b_3(\pi)$ copies of $S^2\times S^2$. In general we…
We establish the method of holomorphic handle attaching to the strongly pseudoconcave boundary of a complex surface. We use this for proving the following statements: (1) every closed connected oriented contact 3-manifold can be filled as…
One approach to produce a pair of homeomorphic-but-not-diffeomophic closed 4-manifolds is to find a knot which is smoothly slice in one but not the other. This approach has never been run successfully. We give the first examples of a pair…
Characterizing face-number-related invariants of a given class of simplicial complexes has been a central topic in combinatorial topology. In this regard, one of the well-known invariants is $g_2$. Let $K$ be a normal $3$-pseudomanifold…
A generic smooth map of a closed $2k$-manifold into $(3k-1)$-space has a finite number of cusps ($\Sigma^{1,1}$-singularities). We determine the possible numbers of cusps of such maps. A fold map is a map with singular set consisting of…
We study trisections of 4-manifolds obtained by spinning and twist-spinning 3-manifolds, and we show that, given a (suitable) Heegaard diagram for the 3-manifold, one can perform simple local modifications to obtain a trisection diagram for…
We construct branched double coverings by certain direct products of manifolds for connected sums of copies of sphere bundles over the 2-sphere. As an application we answer a question of Kotschick and Loeh up to dimension five. More…
A gap in the proof of the main result in reference [1] in our original submission propagated into the constructions presented in the first version of our manuscript. In this version we give an alternative proof for the existence of…
This article presents the constructions of new infinite families of smooth 4-manifolds with the property that any two manifolds in the same family are homeomorphic and, from their construction, seem to be quite different, but cannot be…
We extend Matveev's complexity of 3-manifolds to PL compact manifolds of arbitrary dimension, and we study its properties. The complexity of a manifold is the minimum number of vertices in a simple spine. We study how this quantity changes…