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

We explain the notion of a grope cobordism between two knots in a 3-manifold. Each grope cobordism has a type that can be described by a rooted unitrivalent tree. By filtering these trees in different ways, we show how the Goussarov-Habiro…

We examine questions about surgery on links which arise naturally from the trisection decomposition of 4-manifolds developed by Gay and Kirby. These links lie on Heegaard surfaces in $\#^j S^1 \times S^2$ and have surgeries yielding $\#^k…

We show that there exists an algorithm that takes as input two closed, simply connected, topological 4-manifolds and decides whether or not these 4-manifolds are homeomorphic. In particular, we explain in detail how closed, simply…

We show that every negative definite configuration of symplectic surfaces in a symplectic 4--manifold has a strongly symplectically convex neighborhood. We use this to show that, if a negative definite configuration satisfies an additional…

In geometry, understanding the topologies and the differentiable structures of manifolds in constructive ways is fundamental and important. It is in general difficult, especially for higher dimensional manifolds. The author is interested in…

In this paper we introduce a surgical procedure, called a rational blowdown, for a smooth 4-manifold X and determine how this procedure affects both the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten invariants of X.

In this article we show that every closed orientable smooth $4$--manifold admits a smooth embedding in the complex projective $3$--space.

A 4-manifold is constructed with some curious metric properties; or maybe it is many 4-manifolds masquerading as one, which would explain why it looks curious. Anyway, knots in the 3-sphere with complete finite volume hyperbolic metrics on…

We prove necessary and sufficient conditions for a smooth surface in a 4-manifold X to be pseudoholomorphic with respect to some almost complex structure on X. This provides a systematic approach to the construction of pseudoholomorphic…

M. Freedman showed that every homology 3-sphere embeds as a locally flat submanifold of $S^4$. This is in striking contrast to the state of our knowledge of smooth embeddings of homology spheres. This book surveys what is presently known…

Branch points of a real 2-surface S in a 4-manifold M generalize the branch points of complex curves in complex surfaces: for example, they can occur as singularities of minimal surfaces. We investigate such a branch point p when S is…

Work of numerous authors has shown that any smooth, orientable, closed 4-manifold may be described as a loop of Morse functions on a surface, a loop in the cut complex, a loop in the pants complex, or as a multisection. In this paper, we…

The purpose of this paper is to present some results on the existence of homologous, nonisotopic symplectic or lagrangian surfaces embedded in a simply connected symplectic 4-dimensional manifold.

Topological 4-dimensional surgery is conjectured to fail, in general, for free fundamental groups. M. Freedman and P. Teichner have shown that surgery problems with an arbitrary fundamental group have a solution, provided they satisfy a…

There are many results showing the connection and phenomenon between some low-dimensional manifolds with the profinite completions of their fundamental groups. We focus on some Seifert 4-manifolds about the extent of their profinite…

Fintushel and Stern have proved that if S \subset X is a symplectic surface in a symplectic 4-manifold such that S has simply-connected complement and nonnegative self-intersection, then there are infinitely many topologically equivalent…

Using 1-twist rim surgery, we construct infinitely many smoothly embedded, orientable surfaces in the 4-ball bounding a knot in the 3-sphere that are pairwise topologically isotopic, but not ambient diffeomorphic. We distinguish the…

This article presents a survey on the topic of embedding 3-manifolds in definite 4-manifolds, emphasizing the latest progress in the field. We will focus on the significant role played by Donaldson's diagonalization theorem and the…

The validity of Freedman's disk theorem is known to depend only on the fundamental group. It was conjectured that it fails for nonabelian free fundamental groups. If this were true then surgery theory would work in dimension four. Recently,…

In this paper we study topological surfaces as gridded surfaces in the 2-dimensional scaffolding of cubic honeycombs in Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces.