Related papers: Multiple bridge surfaces restrict knot distance

We prove that all knots with unknotting number at most 21 are smoothly slice in the K3 surface. We also prove a more general statement for 4-manifolds that contain a plumbing tree of spheres. Our strategy is based on a flexible method to…

Given a compact orientable 3-manifold M whose boundary is a hyperbolic surface and a simple closed curve C in its boundary, every knot in M is homotopic to one whose complement admits a complete hyperbolic structure with totally geodesic…

We show that there are hyperbolic tunnel-number one knots with arbitrarily high bridge number and that "most" tunnel-number one knots are not one-bridge with respect to an unknotted torus. The proof relies on a connection between bridge…

It is shown that every knot or link is the set of complex tangents of a 3-sphere smoothly embedded in the three-dimensional complex space. We show in fact that a one-dimensional submanifold of a closed orientable 3-manifold can be realised…

In this brief note, we show that there exist smooth 4-manifolds (with nonempty boundary) containing pairs of exotically knotted 2-spheres that remain exotic after one (either external or internal) stabilization. It follows that the ``one is…

A theorem of Jorgensen and Thurston implies that the volume of a hyperbolic 3-manifold is bounded below by a linear function of its Heegaard genus. Heegaard surfaces and bridge surfaces often exhibit similar topological behavior; thus it is…

A branched covering surface-knot is a surface-knot in the form of a branched covering over a surface-knot. For a branched covering surface-knot, we have a numerical invariant called the simplifying number. We show that branched covering…

Given a simply-connected 4-manifold with boundary the 3-sphere, this paper establishes sufficient conditions for a knot in the boundary to be sliced by a locally flat disc in the 4-manifold, whose complement has finite cyclic fundamental…

We give upper and lower bounds on the leading coefficients of the $L^2$-Alexander torsions of a $3$-manifold $M$ in terms of hyperbolic volumes and of relative $L^2$-torsions of sutured manifolds obtained by cutting $M$ along certain…

We prove that fibred knots cannot be untied with $\bar{t}_{2k}$-moves, for all $k \geq 2$. More generally, we give an upper bound on the number of two strand twist operations that allow to untie a knot with non-trivial HOMFLY polynomial, in…

Let M be a compressionbody containing a graph T (with at least one edge) such that \boundary_+ M is parallel to the union of T and \boundary_- M. We extend methods of Hayashi and Shimokawa to classify bridge surfaces for T. The results of…

In this paper, we show that any open orientable surface S can be properly embedded in H^3 as a minimizing H-surface for any 0<=H<1. We obtained this result by proving a version of the bridge principle at infinity for H-surfaces. We also…

We show that a strongly irreducible and boundary-strongly irreducible surface can be isotoped to be almost normal in a triangulated 3-manifold.

Tollefson described a variant of normal surface theory for 3-manifolds, called Q-theory, where only the quadrilateral coordinates are used. Suppose $M$ is a triangulated, compact, irreducible, boundary-irreducible 3-manifold. In Q-theory,…

Thin position for knots in the 3-sphere was introduced by Gabai and has been used in a variety of contexts. We conjecture an analogue to a theorem of Schubert and Schultens concerning the bridge number of satellite knots. For a satellite…

A knot K in the 3-sphere is superslice if there is a slice disk D in the 4-ball such that the double of D along K is the unknotted 2-sphere S in $S^4$. Answering a question of Livingston-Meier, we find smoothly slice (in fact doubly slice)…

We give the first examples of a pair of knots $K_1$,$K_2$ in the 3-sphere for which their unknotting numbers satisfy $u(K_1\#K_2)<u(K_1)+u(K_2)$ . This answers question 1.69(B) from Kirby's problem list, "Problems in low-dimensional…

Boyer, Gordon, and Watson have conjectured that an irreducible rational homology 3-sphere is an L-space if and only if its fundamental group is not left-orderable. Since Dehn surgeries on knots in $S^3$ can produce large families of…

We study the existence of incompressible embeddings of surfaces into the genus two handlebody. We show that for every compact surface with boundary, orientable or not, there is an incompressible embedding of the surface into the genus two…

Meier and Zupan proved that an orientable surface $\mathcal{K}$ in $S^4$ admits a tri-plane diagram with zero crossings if and only if $\mathcal{K}$ is unknotted, so that the crossing number of $\mathcal{K}$ is zero. We determine the…