相关论文: Introduction to Whitney Towers

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…

Despite spectacular advances in defining invariants for simply connected smooth and symplectic 4-dimensional manifolds and the discovery of effective surgical techniques, we still have been unable to classify simply connected smooth…

Quaternionic tori are defined as quotients of the skew field $\mathbb{H}$ of quaternions by rank-4 lattices. Using slice regular functions, these tori are endowed with natural structures of quaternionic manifolds (in fact quaternionic…

These notes are adapted from two talks given at the 2004 Clay Institute Summer School on Floer homology, gauge theory, and low dimensional topology at the Alfred Renyi Institute. We will quickly review what we do and do not know about the…

Recently Witten introduced a type IIB brane construction with certain boundary conditions to study knot invariants and Khovanov homology. The essential ingredients used in his work are the topologically twisted N = 4 Yang-Mills theory,…

These notes were prepared to supplement the talk that I gave on Feb 19, 2004, at the First East Asian School of Knots and Related Topics, Seoul, South Korea. In this article I review aspects of the interconnections between braids, knots and…

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…

These are notes of lectures given at the school `Birational Geometry of Hypersurfaces' in Gargnano in March 2018. The main goal was to discuss the Hodge structures that come naturally associated with a cubic fourfold. The emphasis is on the…

Topological gauge theories in four dimensions which admit surface operators provide a natural framework for realizing homological knot invariants. Every such theory leads to an action of the braid group on branes on the corresponding moduli…

We use a triple-point version of the Whitney trick to show that ornaments of three orientable $(2k-1)$-manifolds in $\mathbb R^{3k-1}$, $k>2$, are classified by the $\mu$-invariant. A very similar (but not identical) construction was found…

This text arises from teaching advanced undergraduate courses in differential topology for the master curriculum in Mathematics at the University of Pisa. So it is mainly addressed to motivated and collaborative master undergraduate…

These notes were prepared to accompany a sequence of three lectures at the conference Winterbraids XI in Dijon, held in December 2021. In them, we provide an introduction to slice knots and the equivalence relation of concordance. We…

This note is based on a lecture delivered by the author at the Second Conference on Differential Geometry, held in Fez in October 2024. It offers an accessible introduction to biharmonic and biconservative submanifolds, exploring the…

We survey the basic theory of non-commutative K3 surfaces, with a particular emphasis to the ones arising from cubic fourfolds. We focus on the problem of constructing Bridgeland stability conditions on these categories and we then…

We describe rules for building 2d theories labeled by 4-manifolds. Using the proposed dictionary between building blocks of 4-manifolds and 2d N=(0,2) theories, we obtain a number of results, which include new 3d N=2 theories T[M_3]…

These notes are an expanded version of the lectures held in Tromso, in May 2025 at the "Lie-Stormer Summer School : Invariant Theory from classics to modern developments", in the framework of TiME events. We emphasize the analogy between…

We construct many examples of non-slice knots in 3-space that cannot be distinguished from slice knots by previously known invariants. Using Whitney towers in place of embedded disks, we define a geometric filtration of the 3-dimensional…

This paper describes grope and Whitney tower filtrations on the set of concordance classes of classical links in terms of class and order respectively. Using the tree-valued intersection theory of Whitney towers, the associated graded…

These are the lecture notes of a set of lectures delivered at the 1995 Trieste summer school in June. I review some recent work on duality in four dimensional Maxwell theory on arbitrary four manifolds, as well as a new set of topological…

Witten- Helffer-Sj\"ostrand theory is a considerable addition to the De Rham- Hodge theory for Riemannian manifolds and can serve as a general tool to prove results about comparison of numerical invariants associated to compact manifolds…