Related papers: Link groups and the A-B slice problem
The A-B slice problem, a reformulation of the 4-dimensional topological surgery conjecture for free groups, is shown to admit a link-homotopy+ solution. The proof relies on geometric applications of the group-theoretic 2-Engel relation.…
A long-standing conjecture due to Michael Freedman asserts that the 4-dimensional topological surgery conjecture fails for non-abelian free groups, or equivalently that a family of canonical examples of links (the generalized Borromean…
We give two applications of the 2-Engel relation, classically studied in finite and Lie groups, to the 4-dimensional topological surgery conjecture. The A-B slice problem, a reformulation of the surgery conjecture for free groups, is shown…
We prove a geometric refinement of Alexander duality for certain 2-complexes, the so-called gropes, embedded into 4-space. This refinement can be roughly formulated as saying that 4-dimensional Alexander duality preserves the disjoint Dwyer…
A link in the 3-sphere is homotopically trivial, according to Milnor, if its components bound disjoint maps of disks in the 4-ball. This paper concerns the question of what spaces give rise to the same class of homotopically trivial links…
The notion of a Bing cell is introduced, and it is used to define invariants, link groups, of 4-manifolds. Bing cells combine some features of both surfaces and 4-dimensional handlebodies, and the link group \lambda(M) measures certain…
A link in the 3-sphere is called (smoothly) slice if its components bound disjoint smoothly embedded disks in the 4-ball. More generally, given a 4-manifold M with a distinguished circle in its boundary, a link in the 3-sphere is called…
Shake slice generalizes the notion of a slice link, naturally extending the notion of shake slice knots to links. There is also a relative version, shake concordance, that generalizes link concordance. We show that if two links are shake…
The existence of topologically slice knots that are of infinite order in the knot concordance group followed from Freedman's work on topological surgery and Donaldson's gauge theoretic approach to 4-manifolds. Here, as an application of…
This paper continues the study of decompositions of a smooth 4-manifold into two handlebodies with handles of index $\leq2$. Part I gave existence results in terms of spines and chain complexes over the fundamental group of the ambient…
We prove that the canonical 4-dimensional surgery problems can be solved after passing to a double cover. This contrasts the long-standing conjecture about the validity of the topological surgery theorem for arbitrary fundamental groups…
A knot in the 3-sphere is called doubly slice if it is a slice of an unknotted 2-sphere in the 4-sphere. We give a bi-sequence of new obstructions for a knot being doubly slice. We construct it following the idea of Cochran-Orr-Teichner's…
We present the Round Handle Problem, proposed by Freedman and Krushkal. It asks whether a collection of links, which contains the Generalised Borromean Rings, are slice in a 4-manifold R constructed from adding round handles to the four…
In the early 1980's Mike Freedman showed that all knots with trivial Alexander polynomial are topologically slice (with fundamental group Z). This paper contains the first new examples of topologically slice knots. In fact, we give a…
We define Casson-Gordon sigma-invariants for links and give a lower bound of the slice genus of a link in terms of these invariants. We study as an example a family of two component links of genus h and show that their slice genus is h,…
We give a survey of geometric approaches to the topological 4-dimensional surgery and 5-dimensional s-cobordism conjectures, with a focus on the study of surfaces in 4-manifolds. The geometric lemma underlying these conjectures is a…
For $\ell >1$, we develop $L^{(2)}$-signature obstructions for $(4\ell-3)$-dimensional knots with metabelian knot groups to be doubly slice. For each $\ell>1$, we construct an infinite family of knots on which our obstructions are non-zero,…
We provide obstructions to a link in $S^3$ arising as the cross section of any number of unlinked spheres in $S^4$. Our obstructions arise from the multivariable signature, the Blanchfield form and generalised Seifert matrices. We also…
We discuss an obstruction to a knot being smoothly slice that comes from minimum-genus bounds on smoothly embedded surfaces in definite 4-manifolds. As an example, we provide an alternate proof of the fact that the (2,1)-cable of the figure…
We develop a theory of chain complex double-cobordism for chain complexes equipped with Poincar\'{e} duality. The resulting double-cobordism groups are a refinement of Ranicki's torsion algebraic $L$-groups for localisations of a…