Related papers: Regular Seifert surfaces and Vassiliev knot invari…

It is known that if any prime power branched cyclic cover of a knot in the 3-sphere is a homology sphere, then the knot has vanishing Casson-Gordon invariants. We construct infinitely many examples of (topologically) non-slice knots in the…

This note provides a set of separating invariants for the ring of vector invariants $K[V^2]^{S_n}$ of two copies of the natural $S_n$-representation $V = K^n$ over a field of characteristic 0. This set is much smaller than generating sets…

Let $k$ be a field, let $G$ be a reductive algebraic group over $k$, and let $V$ be a linear representation of $G$. Geometric invariant theory involves the study of the $k$-algebra of $G$-invariant polynomials on $V$, and the relation…

Given a closed four-manifold $X$ with an indefinite intersection form, we consider smoothly embedded surfaces in $X \setminus $int$(B^4)$, with boundary a knot $K \subset S^3$. We give several methods to bound the genus of such surfaces in…

We prove that braid invariants coming from quantum gl(N) separate braids, by recalling that these invariants (properly decomposed) are all Vassiliev invariants, showing that all Vassiliev invariants of braids arise in this way, and…

We study smooth maps between smooth manifolds with only fold points as their singularities, and clarify the obstructions to the existence of such a map in a given homotopy class for certain dimensions. The obstructions are described in…

We verify the conjecture formulated in math.AG/0111298 for suspension singularities of type $g(x,y,z)= f(x,y)+z^n$, where $f$ is an irreducible plane curve singularity. More precisely, we prove that the modified Seiberg-Witten invariant of…

We construct knot invariants categorifying the quantum knot variants for all representations of quantum groups. We show that these invariants coincide with previous invariants defined by Khovanov for sl_2 and sl_3 and by Mazorchuk-Stroppel…

We prove that any invariant strong Kahler structure with torsion (SKT structure) on a flag manifold M=G/K of a semisimple compact Lie group G is Kahler. As an application we describe invariant generalized Kahler structures on M.

For a given smooth $2$-knot in $S^4$, we relate the existence of a smooth Seifert hypersurface of a certain class to the existence of irreducible $ SU(2)$-representations of its knot group. For example, we see that any smooth $2$-knot…

We show that there exist non-trivial piecewise-linear (PL) knots with isolated singularities $S^{n-2}\subset S^n$, $n\geq 5$, whose complements have the homotopy type of a circle. This is in contrast to the case of smooth, PL locally-flat,…

In this paper we find a family of knots with trivial Alexander polynomial, and construct two non-isotopic Seifert surfaces for each member in our family. In order to distinguish the surfaces we study the sutured Floer homology invariants of…

This short survey, which was written to accompany a minicourse at the BIRS conference "Topology in dimension 4.5", concerns invariants of knotted $2$-spheres in $S^4$, also known as $2$-knots. It covers invariants extracted from the…

We define the Witt coindex of a link with non-trivial Alexander polynomial, as a concordance invariant from the Seifert form. We show that it provides an upper bound for the (locally flat) slice Euler characteristic of the link, extending…

We construct an inverse system of unstable Vassiliev spectral sequences on the spaces of plumbers' knots, which model the homotopy type of the space of long knots, and show that the limit of these sequences contains the finite type…

We report on recent results of the authors concerning calculations of quantum invariants of Seifert 3-manifolds. These results include a derivation of the Reshetikhin-Turaev invariants of all oriented Seifert manifolds associated with an…

Ozsv\'ath and Szab\'o used the knot filtration on $\widehat{CF}(S^3)$ to define the $\tau$-invariant for knots in the 3-sphere. In this article, we generalize their construction and define a collection of $\tau$-invariants associated to a…

Two knots in three-space are S-equivalent if they are indistinguishable by Seifert matrices. We show that S-equivalence is generated by the doubled-delta move on knot diagrams. It follows as a corollary that a knot has trivial Alexander…

Let $n$ be any natural number. Let $K$ be any $n$-dimensional knot in $S^{n+2}$. We define a supersymmetric quantum system for $K$ with the following properties. We firstly construct a set of functional spaces (spaces of fermionic \{resp.…

A Gauss diagram is a simple, combinatorial way to present a link. It is known that any Vassiliev invariant may be obtained from a Gauss diagram formula that involves counting subdiagrams of certain combinatorial types. In this paper we…