arXiv research

Exposes two methods for constructing flat surfaces in 4D spaces.

Homology handles with trivial Alexander polynomial bound a 3D sphere.

Modified proof constructs dual spheres for 4-manifolds.

We prove a concordance version of the 4-dimensional light bulb theorem for $π_1$-negligible compact orientable surfaces, where there is a framed but not necessarily embedded dual sphere. That is, we show that if $F_0$ and $F_1$ are such surfaces in a 4-manifold $X$ that are homotopic and there exists an immersed framed…

The article examines how many stabilizations are needed to transform 5D s-cobordisms into product cobordisms.

2-spheres in 4-manifolds have complete concordance obstructions if they have immersed dual spheres.

We show, up to h-cobordism, that the existence and uniqueness of connected sum decompositions of oriented 4-dimensional manifolds is an invariant of homotopy equivalence, assuming that the fundamental group of each summand is "good" in the sense of Freedman and Quinn. On a separate note, we observe that the Borel Conje…

New surfaces in 3D manifolds are found that cannot be smoothly deformed into each other.

Under certain homological hypotheses on a compact 4-manifold, we prove exactness of the topological surgery sequence at the stably smoothable normal invariants. The main examples are the class of finite connected sums of 4-manifolds with certain product geometries. Most of these compact manifolds have non-vanishing sec…

Our main result is a generalization of Cappell's 5-dimensional splitting theorem. As an application, we analyze, up to internal s-cobordism, the smoothable splitting and fibering problems for certain 5-manifolds mapping to the circle. For example, these maps may have homotopy fibers which are in the class of finite con…

The paper characterizes when a 2-sphere can be embedded in a knot trace.

David Gabai recently proved a smooth 4-dimensional "Light Bulb Theorem" in the absence of 2-torsion in the fundamental group. We extend his result to 4-manifolds with arbitrary fundamental group by showing that an invariant of Mike Freedman and Frank Quinn gives the complete obstruction to "homotopy implies isotopy" fo…

New 4-manifold examples show necessary conditions for 4D Light Bulb Theorem.

The validity of Freedman's disk theorem is known to depend only on the fundamental group. It was conjectured that it fails for nonabelian free fundamental groups. If this were true then surgery theory would work in dimension four. Recently, Krushkal and Lee proved a surprising result that surgery theory works for a lar…

Connected sums defined for codimension two locally flat submanifolds in higher dimensions.

New theorem removes uniform finite upper bound for shrinkability of null decompositions.

Classifies 4-manifolds with elementary amenable groups and their boundaries.

We give a simple sufficient condition for Quinn's "bordism-type spectra" to be weakly equivalent to strictly associative ring spectra. We also show that Poincare bordism and symmetric L-theory are naturally weakly equivalent to monoidal functors. Part of the proof of these statements involves showing that Quinn's funct…

Improved proofs for topological and smooth pseudo-isotopies of simply connected 4-manifolds.

This paper categorifies Quinn's TQFTs and computes them for specific omega-groupoids.

Freedman proposes a family of Hamiltonians $H_{0,l}$ which define quantum loop gas models on any celluated compact surface. We study the simplest nontrivial cases: celluations of the torus. Our numerical data support Freedman's conjecture, but the conjectured space of ground states does not come out in full.

The paper introduces a new model selection criterion for various time series models.

We present a new, more elementary proof of the Freedman-Teichner result that the geometric classification techniques (surgery, s-cobordism, and pseudoisotopy) hold for topological 4-manifolds with groups of subexponential growth. In an appendix Freedman and Teichner give a correction to their original proof, and reform…

Given a semisimple stable autonomous tensor category over a field $K$, to any group presentation with finite number of generators we associate an element $Q(P)\in K$ invariant under the Andrews-Curtis moves. We show that in fact, this is the same invariant as the one produced by the algorithm of Frank Quinn. The new de…

New links in 3-manifolds have large systole.

Recently, Freedman [arXiv:2301.00295] introduced the idea of packing a maximal number of links into a bounded region subject to geometric constraints, and produced upper bounds on the packing number in some cases, while commenting that these bounds seemed far too large. We show that the smallest of these "extravagantly…

Paper analyzes statistical efficiency of TD learning in Hilbert spaces with Freedman's inequality.

Three great theorems of Thurston read: Haken manifolds are hyperbolic; big ramified coverings are hyperbolic; big surgeries are hyperbolic. Recent developments indicate that the later two theorems are essentially a corollary of the first, that is there are much more Haken manifolds than expected by Thurston. In fact Fr…

Paper proves triple linking form vanishes under specific conditions.

We consider a 2-complex in a particular form, called the Quinn model of a 2-complex. It can be sliced in graphs, where a change from one graph to another can be organized by a sequence of local transitions, which are described in a list of F. Quinn [Q1]. The decomposition of that 2-complex into graphs has to be transla…

We give a new approach to intersection theory. Our "cycles" are closed manifolds mapping into compact manifolds and our "intersections" are elements of a homotopy group of a certain Thom space. The results are then applied in various contexts, including fixed point, linking and disjunction problems. Our main theorems r…

Affirmative proof that rank 3 3-manifolds have filling links.

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 rings) are not A-B slice. A stronger version of the conjecture, that the Borromean r…

We use techniques of Freedman and Teichner to prove that, under certain circumstances, the multi-infection of a slice link is again slice (not necessarily smoothly slice). We provide a general context for proving links are slice that includes many of the previously known results.

In this paper we describe the behavior of solutions of the Klein-Gordon equation, (Box_g+lambda)u=f, on Lorentzian manifolds (X^o,g) which are anti-de Sitter-like (AdS-like) at infinity. Such manifolds are Lorentzian analogues of the so-called Riemannian conformally compact (or asymptotically hyperbolic) spaces, in the…

Freedman, He, and Wang, conjectured in 1994 that the Mobius energy should be minimized, among the class of all nontrivial links in Euclidean space, by the stereographic projection of the standard Hopf link. We prove this conjecture using the min-max theory of minimal surfaces.

Study topological 4-manifolds with specific fundamental groups.

Although Kirby and Siebenmann showed that there are manifolds that do not admit PL structures, the possibility remained that all manifolds could be triangulated. In the late seventies Galewski and Stern and independently Matumoto showed that non-triangulable manifolds exist in all dimensions > 4 if and only if homology…

This is primarily an exposition, combining work of several authors (Curtis, Hsiang, Freedman, Stong, Matveyev, and Bizaca), of the proof that a smooth 5-dimensional h-cobordism between simply connected 4-manifolds is a product off of a contractible piece which itself is diffeomorphic to the 5-ball.

This paper extends some results of Hatcher and Quinn beyond the metastable range. We give a bordism theoretic obstruction to deforming a map between manifolds simultaneously off of a collection of pairwise disjoint submanifolds under the assumption that it can be deformed off of any proper subcollection in a homotopy c…

In my masters thesis I prove a square root bound on the distance of homological codes that come from two dimensional surfaces, as a result of the systolic inequality. I also give a detailed version of M.H. Freedman's proof that due to systolic freedom, this bound does not hold in higher dimensions.

Suppose M is a connected, open, orientable, irreducible 3-manifold which is not homeomorphic to R^3. Given a compact 3-manifold J in M which satisfies certain conditions, Brin and Thickstun have associated to it an open neighborhood V$ called an end reduction of M at J. It has some useful properties which allow one to …

It is well-known that an n-dimensional Poincaré complex $X^n$, $n \ge 5$, has the homotopy type of a compact topological $n$-manifold if the total surgery obstruction $s(X^n)$ vanishes. The present paper discusses recent attempts to prove analogous result in dimension 4. We begin by reviewing the necessary algebraic an…

Simplicial volume vanishes for 4-manifolds with open book decompositions.

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 ball. A negative answer would contradict the union of the surgery conjecture and th…

I will talk about my recent work with Fernando Marques where we used Almgren-Pitts Min-max Theory to settle some open questions in Geometry: The Willmore conjecture, the Freedman-He-Wang conjecture for links (jointly with Ian Agol), and the existence of infinitely many minimal hypersurfaces in manifolds of positive Ric…

Topological 4-dimensional surgery is conjectured to fail, in general, for free fundamental groups. M. Freedman and P. Teichner have shown that surgery problems with an arbitrary fundamental group have a solution, provided they satisfy a certain condition on Dwyer's filtration on second homology. We give a new geometric…

We use the famous knot-theoretic consequence of Freedman's disc theorem---knots with trivial Alexander polynomial bound a locally-flat disc in the 4-ball---to prove the following generalization. The degree of the Alexander polynomial of a knot is an upper bound for twice its topological slice genus. We provide examples…