Related papers: Surfaces in 4-manifolds and the surgery conjecture

We try to give a geometric construction for 3d $\mathcal{N}=2$ gauge theories using three-manifolds and Dehn surgeries. We follow the story that wrapping M5-branes on plumbing three-manifolds leads to 3d theories with mixed Chern-Simons…

We study surface knots in 4-space by using generic planar projections. These projections have fold points and cusps as their singularities and the image of the singular point set divides the plane into several regions. The width (or the…

One strategy for distinguishing smooth structures on closed $4$-manifolds is to produce a knot $K$ in $S^3$ that is slice in one smooth filling $W$ of $S^3$ but not slice in some homeomorphic smooth filling $W'$. In this paper we explore…

A notion of dual curve for pseudoholomorphic curves in 4--manifolds turns out to be possible only if the notion of almost complex structure structure is slightly generalized. The resulting structure is as easy (perhaps easier) to work with,…

These are lecture notes from a mini-course taught at Winterbraids XIII (Montpellier, 2024). The main character of these notes are curves in the complex projective plane, viewed from a topological perspective.

We show that any 4-manifold, after surgery on a curve, admits an achiral Lefschetz fibration. In particular, we show that the connected sum of any simply connected 4-manifold with a 2-sphere bundle over the 2-sphere will admit an achiral…

We describe rules for building 2d theories labeled by 4-manifolds. Using the proposed dictionary between building blocks of 4-manifolds and 2d N=(0,2) theories, we obtain a number of results, which include new 3d N=2 theories T[M_3]…

The purpose of this note is to study the bounded isometry conjecture proposed by Lalonde and Polterovich. In particular, we show that the conjecture holds for the Kodaira-Thurston manifold with the standard symplectic form and for the…

We consider the question: "If the zero-framed surgeries on two oriented knots in the 3-sphere are integral homology cobordant, preserving the homology class of the positive meridians, are the knots themselves concordant?" We show that this…

We give complete geometric invariants of cobordisms of fold maps with oriented singular set and cobordisms of even codimensional fold maps. These invariants are given in terms of cobordisms of stably framed manifolds and cobordisms of…

We find conditions under which a non-orientable closed surface S embedded into an orientable closed 4-manifold X can be represented by a connected sum of an embedded closed surface in X and an unknotted projective plane in a 4-sphere. This…

Finite-order invariants of knots in arbitrary 3-manifolds (including non-orientable ones) are constructed and studied by methods of the topology of discriminant sets. Obstructions to the integrability of admissible weight systems to…

We study simple wrinkled fibrations, a variation of the simplified purely wrinkled fibrations introduced by Williams, and their combinatorial description in terms of surface diagrams. We show that simple wrinkled fibrations induce handle…

We calculate the Seiberg-Witten invariants of branched covers of prime degree, where the branch locus consists of embedded spheres. Aside from the formula itself, our calculations give rise to some new constraints on configurations 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 the skein lasagna theory of Morrison-Walker-Wedrich to 4-manifolds with corners and formulate gluing formulas for 4-manifolds with boundary and, more generally, with corners. As an application, we develop a categorical framework…

An involution on a surface induces involutions on the cohomology, the Chow group and the Brauer group of the surface. We give a detailed study of those actions. We show that the odd part of these groups can be used to describe the geometry…

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

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…

We discuss differences between genera of smooth and locally-flat non-orientable surfaces in the 4-ball with boundary a given torus knot or 2-bridge knot. In particular, we establish that a result by Batson on the smooth non-orientable…