arXiv research

Study String$^c$ structures using algebraic topology and generalize Witten genera.

Unified Lie structures in homotopy and isotopy calculus.

Studying the M-branes leads us naturally to new structures that we call Membrane-, Membrane^c-, String^K(Z,3)- and Fivebrane^K(Z,4)-structures, which we show can also have twisted counterparts. We study some of their basic properties, highlight analogies with structures associated with lower levels of the Whitehead tow…

We construct a C-space associated with every closed 3-form on a spacetime $M$ and show that it depends on the class of the form in $H^3(M, Z)$. We also demonstrate that C-spaces have a relation to generalized geometry and to gerbes. C-spaces are constructed after introducing additional coordinates at the open sets and …

In earlier work, we introduced the `Monster tower', a tower of fibrations associated to planar curves. We constructed an algorithm for classifying its points with respect to the equivalence relation generated by the action of the contact pseudogroup on the tower. Here, we construct the analogous tower for curves in $n$…

The monster tower is a tower of spaces over a specified base; each space in the tower is a parameter space for curvilinear data up to a specified order. We describe and analyze a natural stratification of these spaces.

Notes on Whitney towers in 4-manifolds, focusing on local surface manipulations and invariants.

Defines Whitehead torsion for topological spaces via K-theory.

We study the structure of the exteriors of gropes and Whitney towers in dimension 4, focusing on their fundamental groups. In particular we introduce a notion of unknottedness of gropes and Whitney towers in the 4-sphere. We prove that various modifications of gropes and Whitney towers preserve the unknottedness and do…

Nonpositive towers property in 3-manifolds spines.

Study on Whitehead doubles and their sliceness properties.

We compute the A-polynomial 2-tuple of twisted Whitehead links. As applications, we determine canonical components of twisted Whitehead links and give a formula for the volume of twisted Whitehead link cone-manifolds.

We study the asymptotic growth of Betti numbers in tower of finite covers and provide simple proofs of approximation results, which were previously obtained by Calegari-Emerton, in the generality of arbitrary p-adic analytic towers of covers. Further, we also obtain partial results about arbitrary pro-$p$ towers.

A complex projective tower or simply a $\mathbb CP$-tower is an iterated complex projective fibrations starting from a point. In this paper we classify all 6-dimensional $\mathbb CP$-towers up to diffeomorphism, and as a consequence, we show that all such manifolds are cohomologically rigid, i.e., they are completely d…

Computes A-polynomials of knots from Whitehead sister link fillings.

We consider here the problem of classifying orbits of an action of the dif- feomorphism group of 3-space on a tower of fibrations with P2-fibers that generalize the Monster Tower due to Montgomery and Zhitomirskii. As a corollary we give the first steps towards the problem of classifying Goursat 2-flags of small length…

In this paper we construct, for n >= 2, arbitrarily large families of infinite towers of compact, orientable Riemannian n-manifolds which are isospectral but not isometric at each stage. In dimensions two and three, the towers produced consist of hyperbolic 2-manifolds and hyperbolic 3-manifolds, and in these cases we …

Character variety of Whitehead link described in detail.

We show that Tim Cochran's invariants $β^i(L)$ of a $2$-component link $L$ in the $3$--sphere can be computed as intersection invariants of certain 2-complexes in the $4$--ball with boundary $L$. These 2-complexes are special types of twisted Whitney towers, which we call {\em Cochran towers}, and which exhibit a new p…

Whitehead doubles have matching meridional rank and bridge number.

We obtain several results about stability of the Bergman kernel on a tower of coverings on complex manifolds. An effective version of Rhodes' result is given for a tower of coverings on a compact Riemann surface of genus greater than or equal to 2. Stability of the Bergman kernel is established for towers of coverings …

We describe Taylor towers for spaces of knots arising from Goodwillie-Weiss calculus of the embedding functor and extend the configuration space integrals of Bott and Taubes from spaces of knots to the stages of the towers. We show that certain combinations of integrals, indexed by trivalent diagrams, yield cohomology …

We prove the volume conjecture for an infinite family of links called Whitehead chains that generalizes both the Whitehead link and the Borromean rings.

Link concordance and Whitney towers linked to Milnor invariants.

We introduce a notion of symmetric Whitney tower cobordism between bordered 3-manifolds, aiming at the study of homology cobordism and link concordance. It is motivated by the symmetric Whitney tower approach to slicing knots and links initiated by Cochran, Orr, and Teichner. We give amenable Cheeger-Gromov rho-invaria…

Starting from works by Scherk (1835) and by Enneper-Weierstraß\ (1863), new minimal surfaces with Scherk ends were found only in 1988 by Karcher (see \cite{Karcher1,Karcher}). In the singly periodic case, Karcher's examples of positive genera had been unique until Traizet obtained new ones in 1996 (see \cite{Traizet}).…

Researchers create new triply periodic minimal surfaces by gluing saddle towers.

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 filtrations of classical link concordance by order n (twisted) Whitney towers in th…

Criterion for congruence RFRS towers in hyperbolic lattices.

We present complete classifications of links in the 3-sphere modulo framed and twisted Whitney towers in a rational homology 4-ball. This provides a geometric characterization of the vanishing of the Milnor invariants of links in terms of Whitney towers. Our result also says that the higher order Arf invariants, which …

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 finitely generated abelian groups. Twisted Whitney towers are studied and a new qua…

In this note we show that the configuration spaces of the kinematic system constructed in [4] and [12] gives rise to a natural tower of sphere bundles. Moreover, we prove that, each tower of projective bundles associated to special multi- flags (cf [1], [13], [2], [3]), we can associate such a tower of sphere bundles w…

We study the Whitehead torsions of inertial h-cobordisms, and identify various types representing a nested sequence of subsets of the Whitehead group. A number of examples are given to show that these subsets are all different in general.

We provide an example in each rank of an ageometric fully irreducible outer automorphism whose ideal Whitehead graph has a cut vertex. Consequently, we show that there exist examples in each rank of Handel-Mosher axis bundles that are not just a single axis, as well as of "nongeneric" behavior in the sense of the "trai…

A Bott tower is the total space of a tower of fibre bundles with base CP^1 and fibres CP^1. Every Bott tower of height n is a smooth projective toric variety whose moment polytope is combinatorially equivalent to an n-cube. A circle action is semifree if it is free on the complement to fixed points. We show that a (qua…

Using geodesic currents, we provide a theoretical justification for some of the experimental results regarding the behavior of Whitehead's algorithm on non-minimal inputs, that were obtained by Haralick, Miasnikov and Myasnikov via pattern recognition methods. In particular we prove that the images of "random" elements…

We further study the incidence relations that arise from the various subtowers, known as Baby Monster, which exist within the $\mathbb{R}^{3}$-Monster Tower. This allows us to complete the $RVT$ class spelling rules. We also present a method of calculating the various Baby Monster that appear within the Monster Tower.

We show that if K is any knot whose Ozsvath-Szabo concordance invariant tau(K) is positive, the all-positive Whitehead double of any iterated Bing double of K is topologically but not smoothly slice. We also show that the all-positive Whitehead double of any iterated Bing double of the Hopf link (e.g., the all-positive…

Paper confirms Whitehead's conjecture for aspherical 2-complexes.

Study of embedding spaces using homotopy theory and operads.

This paper investigates the space of codimension zero embeddings of a Poincare duality space in a disk. One of our main results exhibits a tower that interpolates from the space of Poincare immersions to a certain space of "unlinked" Poincare embeddings. The layers of this tower are described in terms of the coefficien…

Functional AD for Weil algebra computations.

Higher-order tangent bundles have geometric structures compatible with their iterated bundle structure.

We construct a higher Whitehead torsion map, using algebraic K-theory of spaces, and show that it satisfies the usual properties of the classical Whitehead torsion. This is used to describe a "geometric assembly map" defined on stabilized structure spaces in purely homotopy theoretic terms.

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 quotients are shown to be finitely generated abelian groups under a (surprisingly) we…

The Whitehead link complement's geometry and topology are studied using ideal triangulations and tropical geometry.

A technique to calculate the colored Jones polynomials of satellite knots, illustrated by the Whitehead doubles of knots, is presented. Then we prove the volume conjecture for Whitehead doubles of a family of torus knots and show some interesting observations.

The operation of (untwisted) Whitehead doubling trivializes the Alexander module of a knot (and consequently, all known abelian invariants), and converts knots to topologically slice ones. In this note we show that Whitehead doubling does not trivialize the rational function that equals to the 2-loop part of the Kontse…