Related papers: Surfaces in 4-manifolds and the surgery conjecture
Symmetries of Seiberg-Witten (SW) geometries capture intricate physical aspects of the underlying 4d $\mathcal{N} = 2$ field theories. For rank-one theories, these geometries are rational elliptic surfaces whose automorphism group is a…
We study collections of curves in generic position on a closed surface whose complement consists of one disk only, up to orientation-preserving homeomorphism of the surface. We define a surgery operation on the set of such collections and…
We explain new developments in classical knot theory in 3 and 4~dimensions, i.e. we study knots in 3-space, up to isotopy as well as up to concordance. In dimension~3 we give a geometric interpretation of the Kontsevich integral (joint with…
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 construct four-dimensional symplectic cobordisms between contact three-manifolds generalizing an example of Eliashberg. One key feature is that any handlebody decomposition of one of these cobordisms must involve three-handles. The other…
As an example of the transitions between some of the eight geometries of Thurston, investigated before, we study the geometries supported by the cone-manifolds obtained by surgery on the trefoil knot with singular set the core of the…
We show that any 4-manifold admitting a $(g;k_1,k_2,0)$-trisection is an irregular 3-fold cover of the 4-sphere whose branching set is a surface in $S^4$, smoothly embedded except for one singular point which is the cone on a link. A…
We show that only finitely many links in a closed 3-manifold share the same complement, up to twists along discs and annuli. Using the same techniques, we prove that by adding 2-handles on the same link we get only finitely many smooth…
We show that all large enough positive integral surgeries on algebraic knots bound a 4-manifold with a negative definite plumbing tree, which we describe explicitly. Then we apply the lattice embedding obstruction coming from Donaldson's…
While the study of bordered (pseudo-)holomorphic curves with boundary on Lagrangian submanifolds has a long history, a similar problem that involves (special) Lagrangian submanifolds with boundary on complex surfaces appears to be largely…
In this article, we construct countably many mutually non-isotopic diffeomorphisms of some closed non simply-connected 4-manifolds that are homotopic to but not isotopic to the identity, by surgery along $\Theta$-graphs. As corollaries of…
The simple loop conjecture for 3-manifolds states that every 2-sided immersion of a closed surface into a 3-manifold is either injective on fundamental groups or admits a compression. This can be viewed as a generalization of the Loop…
The notion of 2-framed three-manifolds is defined. The category of 2-framed cobordisms is described, and used to define a 2-framed three-dimensional TQFT. Using skeletonization and special features of this category, a small set of data and…
Suppose that $C=(C_1,..., C_m)$ is a configuration of 2-dimensional symplectic submanifolds in a symplectic 4-manifold $(X,\omega)$ with connected, negative definite intersection graph $\Gamma_C$. We show that by replacing an appropriate…
In the lecture notes, the author will survey the development of conformal geometry on four dimensional manifolds. The topic she chooses is one on which she has been involved in the past twenty or more years: the study of the integral…
We classify topological $4$-manifolds with boundary and fundamental group $\mathbb{Z}$, under some assumptions on the boundary. We apply this to classify surfaces in simply-connected $4$-manifolds with $S^3$ boundary, where the fundamental…
By classical results of Rochlin, Thom, Wallace and Lickorish, it is well-known that any two 3-manifolds (with diffeomorphic boundaries) are related one to the other by surgery operations. Yet, by restricting the type of the surgeries, one…
By using the gluing formula of the Seiberg-Witten invariant, we compute the Yamabe invariant Y(X) of 4-manifolds X obtained by performing surgeries along points, circles or tori on compact Kaehler surfaces. For instance, if M is a compact…
We present new smoothing techniques for topologically embedded surfaces in smooth 4-manifolds, which give topological isotopy to a smooth surface. As applications, we prove "topological = smooth" results in dimension 4 for certain disks and…
We prove that the generalized rational blowdown, a surgery on smooth 4-manifolds, can be performed in the symplectic category.