Related papers: Links, two-handles, and four-manifolds

We present existence results for certain singular 2-dimensional foliations on 4-manifolds. The singularities can be chosen to be simple, e.g. the same as those that appear in Lefschetz pencils. There seems to be a wealth of such creatures…

Let $M$ be a closed, connected, orientable topological four-manifold with $H_1(M)$ nontrivial and free abelian, $b_2(M)\ne 0, 2$, and $\chi(M)\ne 0$. We show that if $G$ is a finite group of 2-rank $\le 1$ which admits a homologically…

We develop a technique for gluing relative trisection diagrams of $4$-manifolds with nonempty connected boundary to obtain trisection diagrams for closed $4$-manifolds. As an application, we describe a trisection of any closed $4$-manifold…

We answer a question of Freedman and Krushkal, producing filling links in any closed, orientable 3-manifold. The links we construct are hyperbolic, and have large essential systole, contrasting earlier geometric constraints on hyperbolic…

Under certain homological hypotheses on a compact 4-manifold, we prove exactness of the topological surgery sequence at the stably smoothable normal invariants. The main examples are the class of finite connected sums of 4-manifolds with…

We introduce a representation of compact 3-manifolds without spherical boundary components via (regular) 4-colored graphs, which turns out to be very convenient for computer aided study and tabulation. Our construction is a direct…

A divide is the image of a proper and generic immersion of a compact $1$-manifold into the $2$-disk. Due to A'Campo's theory, each divide is associated with a link in the 3-sphere. In this paper, we reveal a hidden hyperbolic structure in…

We prove that, under a simple condition on the cohomology ring, every closed 4-manifold has mod 2 Seiberg-Witten simple type. This result shows that there exists a large class of topological 4-manifolds such that all smooth structures have…

We show that every smooth, orientable, closed, connected 4-manifold can be represented by a loop in the pants complex. We use this representation, together with the fact that the pants complex is simply connected, to provide an elementary…

We analyze four-dimensional symplectic manifolds of type $X=S^1 \times M^3$ where $M^3$ is an open $3$-manifold admitting inequivalent fibrations leading to inequivalent symplectic structures on $X$. For the case where $M^3 \subset S^3$ is…

We show that for any finitely presented group $G$, there is a simply connected closed 4-manifold containing an infinite family of topologically isotopic but smoothly inequivalent 2-links whose 2-link group is $G$. We also show that, if $G$…

A new topological invariant of closed connected orientable four-dimensional manifolds is proposed. The invariant, constructed via surgery on a special link, is a four-dimensional counterpart of the celebrated SU(2) three-manifold invariant…

This is a slightly altered version of the authors thesis from 2014. In the first main part we show that the quotient space of a compact, simply connected and nonnegatively curved Riemannian 4-manifold by an effective, isometric…

A {\em blink} is a plane graph with an arbitrary bipartition of its edges. As a consequence of a recent result of Martelli, I show that the homeomorphisms classes of closed oriented 3-manifolds are in 1-1 correspondence with specific…

Closed (and simply-connected) manifolds whose dimensions are larger than 4 are central geometric objects in classical algebraic topology and differential topology. They have been classified via algebraic and abstract objects. On the other…

In this paper we will show that two surfaces of the same genus and homology class in a simply connected 4-manifold are concordant. We will show they are often topologically isotopic when their complements have cyclic fundamental group.…

The purpose of this note is to show that classical cobordism arguments, which go back to the pioneering works of Mandelbaum and Moishezon, provide quick and unified proofs of any knot surgered compact simply-connected 4-manifold X_K…

Relative self-linking and linking "numbers" for pairs of knots in oriented 3-manifolds are defined in terms of intersection invariants of immersed surfaces in 4-manifolds. The resulting concordance invariants generalize the usual…

We prove that two closed oriented 3-manifolds have isomorphic quintuplets (homology, space of spin structures, linking pairing, cohomology rings, Rochlin function) if, and only if, they belong to the same class of a certain surgery…

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…