arXiv research

Study classifies Morse functions with 4 critical points on immersed 2-spheres.

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

Study on sphere immersions and their stability indices.

An obstruction theory for representing homotopy classes of surfaces in 4-manifolds by immersions with pairwise disjoint images is developed, using the theory of non-repeating Whitney towers. The accompanying higher-order intersection invariants provide a geometric generalization of Milnor's link-homotopy invariants, an…

Study biharmonic conformal immersions into a 3D flat space, finding new examples and classifications.

We study curvature functionals for immersed 2-spheres in a compact, three-dimensional Riemannian manifold M. Under the assumption that the sectional curvature of M is strictly positive, we prove the existence of a smoothly immersed sphere minimizing the L^{2} integral of the second fundamental form. Assuming instead th…

The space of all immersed closed curves of rotation degree 0 in the plane modulo reparametrizations has the same homotopy groups as the circle times the 2-sphere.

Motivated by the rich theory of harmonic maps from a 2-sphere, we study biharmonic maps from a 2-sphere in this paper. We first derive biharmonic equation for rotationally symmetric maps between rotationally symmetric 2-manifolds. We then apply the equation to obtain a classification of biharmonic maps in a family of r…

Proves existence of curves with constant curvature in a sphere.

A self-transverse immersion of the 2-sphere into 4-space with algebraic number of self intersection points equal to -n induces an immersion of the circle bundle over the 2-sphere of Euler class 2n into 4-space. Precomposing the circle bundle immersions with their universal covering maps, we get for n>0 immersions g_n o…

In this paper, we determine all conformal minimal immersions of 2-spheres in complex Grassmann manifold $G(2,N; \mathbb{C})$ with parallel second fundamental form.

The classification of Willmore 2-spheres in the $n$-dimensional sphere $S^n$ is a long-standing problem, solved only when $n=3,4$ by Bryant, Ejiri, Musso and Montiel independently. In this paper we give a classification when $n=5$. There are three types of such surfaces up to Möbius transformations: (1) super-conformal…

We characterize those unions of embedded disjoint circles in the 2-sphere which can be the multiple point set of a generic immersion of the 2-sphere into 3-dimensional space in terms of the interlacement of the given circles. Our result is the one higher dimensional analogue of Rosenstiehl's characterization of words b…

The self intersection of an immersion i : S^2 \to R^3 dissects S^2 into pieces which are planar surfaces (unless i is an embedding). In this work we determine what collections of planar surfaces may be obtained in this way. In particular, for every n we construct an immersion i : S^2 \to R^3 with 2n triple points, for …

This paper explores Brunnian twin groups and their properties.

Analytic saddle spheres in S^3 are equators.

Study BF invariants using simple type concepts.

We study isometric immersions of surfaces of constant curvature into the homogeneous spaces H2xR and S2xR. In particular, we prove that there exists a unique isometric immersion from the standard 2-sphere of constant curvature c>0 into H2xR and a unique one into S2xR when c>1, up to isometries of the ambient space. Mor…

We show that the number of double points of smoothly immersed 2-spheres representing certain homology classes of an oriented, smooth, closed, simply-connected 4-manifold X must increase with the complexity of corresponding h-cobordisms from X to X. As an application, we give results restricting the minimal number of do…

Invariant detects triple points in sphere immersions.

Study finds the volume of unit vector fields on a punctured sphere and shows their images match minimally immersed Klein bottles.

We prove existence and regularity of minimisers for the Canham-Helfrich energy in the class of weak (possibly branched and bubbled) immersions of the $2$-sphere. This solves (the spherical case) of the minimisation problem proposed by Helfrich in 1973, modelling lipid bilayer membranes. On the way to prove the main res…

Proves existence of special 2-spheres in curved 3-spaces.

Doodles link to commutator identities in a 2-sphere.

The aim of this paper (inspired from a problem of Habegger) is to describe the set of cubical decompositions of compact manifolds mod out by a set of combinatorial moves analogous to the bistellar moves considered by Pachner, which we call bubble moves. One constructs a surjection from this set onto the the bordism gro…

We consider properties of the total absolute geodesic curvature functional on circle immersions into a Riemann surface. In particular, we study its behavior under regular homotopies, its infima in regular homotopy classes, and the homotopy types of spaces of its local minima. We consider properties of the total curvatu…

We compute the group of link homotopy classes of link maps of two 2-spheres into 4-space. It turns out to be free abelian, generated by geometric constructions applied to the Fenn-Rolfsen link map and detected by two self-intersection invariants introduced by Paul Kirk in this setting. As a corollary, we show that any …

We characterise the maps into the space of $2$-spheres in $S^n$ that are the conformal Gauss maps of conformal immersions of a surface. In particular, we give an invariant formulation and efficient proof of a characterisation, due to Dorfmeister--Wang \cites{DorWan13,DorWan}, of the harmonic maps that are conformal Gau…

This paper solves part of a problem by constructing surfaces with specific curvature and singularities.

Link projections with the same circle arrangement can be transformed by specific moves.

The paper is devoted to the variational analysis of the Willmore, and other L^2 curvature functionals, among immersions of 2-dimensional surfaces into a compact riemannian m-manifold (M^m,h) with m>2. The goal of the paper is twofold, on one hand, we give the right setting for doing the calculus of variations (includin…

Doodles were introduced in [R. Fenn and P. Taylor, Introducing doodles, Topology of low-dimensional manifolds, pp. 37--43, Lecture Notes in Math., 722, Springer, Berlin, 1979] but were restricted to embedded circles in the 2-sphere. Khovanov, [M. Khovanov, Doodle groups, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 349 (1997), 2297--2315],…

The paper studies the space of Gauss maps of complete minimal surfaces and their homotopy types.

We prove that finite area isolated singularities of surfaces with constant positive curvature in R^3 are removable singularities, branch points or immersed conical singularities. We describe the space of immersed conical singularities of such surfaces in terms of the class of real analytic closed locally convex curves …

In this paper we provide a characterization for a class of convex curves on the 3-sphere. More precisely, using a theorem that decomposes a locally convex curve on the 3-sphere as a pair of curves on the 2-sphere, one of which is locally convex and the other is an immersion, we are capable of completely characterize a …

A conformal immersion of a 2-torus into the 4-sphere is characterized by an auxiliary Riemann surface, its spectral curve. This complex curve encodes the monodromies of a certain Dirac type operator on a quaternionic line bundle associated to the immersion. The paper provides a detailed description of the geometry and …

Study of Willmore energy on sphere sublevel sets and flow singularities.

CMC-1 trinoids (i.e. constant mean curvature one immersed surface with three regular embedded ends) in hyperbolic 3-space H^3 are irreducible generically, and the irreducible ones have been classified. However, the reducible case has not yet been fully treated, so in this paper we give an explicit description of CMC-1 …

Study shows how tangle moduli spaces relate to boundary surfaces.

We prove that the least area of the non-contractible immersed spheres is no more than $4π$ in any oriented compact manifold with dimension $n+2\leq 7$ which satisfies $R\geq 2$ and admits a map to $\mathbf S^2\times T^n$ with nonzero degree. We also prove a rigidity result for the equality case. This can be viewed as a…

32 knot projections classified based on forbidden Reidemeister moves.

Let $M$ be a complete Riemannian $3$-manifold with sectional curvatures between $0$ and $1$. A minimal $2$-sphere immersed in $M$ has area at least $4π$. If an embedded minimal sphere has area $4π$, then $M$ is isometric to the unit $3$-sphere or to a quotient of the product of the unit $2$-sphere with $\mathbb{R}$, wi…

While the topology of the space of all smooth immersed curves on the $2$-sphere $\mathbb{S}^2$ that start and end at given points in given directions is well known, it is an open problem to understand the homotopy type of its subspaces consisting of the curves whose geodesic curvatures are constrained to a prescribed p…

We introduce a flow of maps from a compact surface of arbitrary genus to an arbitrary Riemannian manifold which has elements in common with both the harmonic map flow and the mean curvature flow, but is more effective at finding minimal surfaces. In the genus 0 case, our flow is just the harmonic map flow, and it tries…

Minimal surfaces in S3(2) linked to vector fields on punctured sphere.

We consider the generalization of classical Blaschke's Problem to higher codimension case, characterizing Darboux pair of isothermic surfaces and dual S-Willmore surfaces as the only non-trivial surface pairs that envelop a 2-sphere congruence and conformally correspond to each other. When the sphere congruence is the …

Soliton spheres are immersed 2-spheres in the conformal 4-sphere S^4=HP^1 that allow rational, conformal parametrizations f:CP^1->HP^1 obtained via twistor projection and dualization from rational curves in CP^{2n+1}. Soliton spheres can be characterized as the case of equality in the quaternionic Pluecker estimate. A …

The paper proves the existence of H-spheres with arbitrary codimensions in certain Riemannian manifolds.