Related papers: Knot concordance, Whitney towers and L^2 signature…
We introduce new obstructions to topological knot concordance. These are obtained from amenable groups in Strebel's class, possibly with torsion, using a recently suggested $L^2$-theoretic method due to Orr and the author. Concerning…
We prove the nontriviality, at all integral levels n, of the filtration, F_n, of the classical topological knot concordance group recently defined by the authors and Kent Orr [COT]. Recall that this filtration is significant not only…
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…
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…
This paper computes Whitney tower filtrations of classical links. Whitney towers consist of iterated stages of Whitney disks and allow a tree-valued intersection theory, showing that the associated graded quotients of the filtration are…
Knot concordance plays a crucial role in the low dimensional topology. We propose a very elementary techniques which allows one to construct a lot of sliceness obstructions for knots in the full torus. Our approach deals with group…
We define a set of "second-order" L^(2)-signature invariants for any algebraically slice knot. These obstruct a knot's being a slice knot and generalize Casson-Gordon invariants, which we consider to be "first-order signatures". As one…
Knots and links in 3-manifolds are studied by applying intersection invariants to singular concordances. The resulting link invariants generalize the Arf invariant, the mod 2 Sato-Levine invariants, and Milnor's triple linking numbers.…
We obtain new invariants of topological link concordance and homology cobordism of 3-manifolds from Hirzebruch-type intersection form defects of towers of iterated p-covers. Our invariants can extract geometric information from an arbitrary…
We show how to measure the failure of the Whitney trick in dimension 4 by constructing higher- order intersection invariants of Whitney towers built from iterated Whitney disks on immersed surfaces in 4-manifolds. For Whitney towers on…
The first part of this paper completes the classification of Whitney towers in the 4-ball that was started in three related papers. We provide an algebraic framework allowing the computations of the graded groups associated to geometric…
We propose and analyze a structure with which to organize the difference between a knot in the 3-sphere bounding a topologically embedded 2-disk in the 4-ball and it bounding a smoothly embedded disk. The n-solvable filtration of the…
In a groundbreaking work A. Levine proved the surprising result that there exist knots in homology spheres which are not smoothly concordant to any knot in $S^3$, even if one allows for concordances in homology cobordisms. Since then…
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 use d invariants of the 2-fold branched cover to show nonsliceness of a set of algebraically slice knots.
We show that for each $k\in\mathbb{N}$, a link $L\subset S^3$ bounds a degree $k$ Whitney tower in the 4-ball if and only if it is \emph{$C_k$-concordant} to the unlink. This means that $L$ is obtained from the unlink by a finite sequence…
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 describes the relationship between the first non-vanishing Milnor invariants of a classical link and the intersection invariant of a twisted Whitney tower. This is a certain 2-complex in the 4-ball, built from immersed disks…
A geometric characterization of the Arf invariant of a knot in the 3-sphere is given in terms of two kinds of 4-dimensional bordisms, half-gropes and Whitney towers. These types of bordisms have associated complexities class and order which…
The knot Floer complex and the concordance invariant $\varepsilon$ can be used to define a filtration on the smooth concordance group. We exhibit an ordered subset of this filtration that is isomorphic to $\mathbb{N} \times \mathbb{N}$ and…