Related papers: Hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations and branched co…

We mostly determine which closed smooth oriented 4-manifolds fibering over lower dimensional manifolds are virtually symplectic, i.e. finitely covered by symplectic 4-manifolds.

We characterize the cyclic branched covers of the 2-sphere where every homeomorphism of the sphere lifts to a homeomorphism of the covering surface. This answers a question that appeared in an early version of the erratum of Birman and…

Given a symplectic manifold $(M^{2n},\omega)$ we study Lagrangian cobordisms $V\subset E$ where $E$ is the total space of a Lefschetz fibration having $M$ as generic fiber. We prove a generation result for these cobordisms in the…

We show that, given $d \geq 4$ and two closed connected oriented PL $4$-manifolds $M$ and $N$ such that $N$ has a handle decomposition with no $1$- and $3$-handles, there exists a $d$-fold simple branched covering $p \colon M \darrow{d} N$…

We compute the mapping class group-valued monodromy of any sufficiently ample linear system on any smooth simply connected projective surface, identifying this with the r-spin mapping class group associated to a maximal root of the adjoint…

In this paper, we study the structure, deformations and the moduli spaces of complex projective surfaces admitting genus two fibrations over elliptic curves. We observe that, a surface admitting a smooth fibration as above is elliptic and…

For a hyperbolic fibered 3-manifold M, we prove results that uniformly relate the structure of surface projections as one varies the fibrations of M. This extends our previous work from the fully-punctured to the general case.

In this article we study Lefschetz fibration structures on knot surgery 4-manifolds obtained from an elliptic surface E(2) using Kanenobu knots $K$. As a result, we get an infinite family of simply connected mutually diffeomorphic…

The Arakelov--Parshin rigidity theorem implies that a holomorphic Lefschetz fibration $\pi: M \to S^2$ of genus $g \geq 2$ admits only finitely many holomorphic sections $\sigma:S^2 \to M$. We show that an analogous finiteness theorem does…

We study necessary and sufficient conditions for a 4-dimensional Lefschetz fibration over the 2-disk to admit a $\text{Pin}^{\pm}$-structure, extending the work of A. Stipsicz in the orientable setting. As a corollary, we get existence…

A topological space is called self-covering if it is a nontrivial cover of itself. We prove that a closed self-covering manifold $M$ with free abelian fundamental group fibers over a circle under certain assumptions. In particular, we give…

We prove the long-standing Montesinos conjecture that any closed oriented PL 4-manifold M is a simple covering of S^4 branched over a locally flat surface (cf [J M Montesinos, 4-manifolds, 3-fold covering spaces and ribbons, Trans. Amer.…

We discuss $4$-dimensional achiral Lefschetz fibrations bounding $3$-dimensional open books and study their Lefschetz fibration (LF) embedding in a bounded $6$-dimensional manifold, in the sense of Ghanwat--Pancholi. As an application we…

We show that for each k > 3 there are infinitely many finite type Stein manifolds diffeomorphic to Euclidean space R^{2k} which are pairwise distinct as symplectic manifolds.

Let M be a smooth closed manifold and T*M its cotangent bundle endowed with the usual symplectic structure. A hypersurface S in T*M is said to be fiberwise starshaped if for each point q in M the intersection of S with the fiber at q is…

Techniques for constructing codimension 2 embeddings and immersions of the 2 and 3-fold branched covers of the 3 and 4-dimensional spheres are presented. These covers are in braided form, and it is in this sense that they are folded. More…

Concerns decompositions of smooth 4-manifolds as the union of two handlebodies, each with handles of index <=2 (``Heegard'' decompositions).Sample result: Two 2-complexes are (up to 2-deformation) dual spines of a Heegard decomposition of…

We prove that if a contact 3-manifold admits an open book decomposition of genus 0, a certain intersection pattern cannot appear in the homology of any of its minimal symplectic fillings, and moreover, fillings cannot contain symplectic…

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…

The branched virtual fibering theorem by Sakuma states that every closed orientable $3$-manifold with a Heegaard surface of genus $g$ has a branched double cover which is a genus $g$ surface bundle over the circle. It is proved by Brooks…