arXiv research

Totally geodesic surfaces found in knots and links.

New invariants measure how far spanning surfaces are from being compressible.

Refines knot defect measurement in 3D and 4D.

Study Murasugi sum in 4D for knotted surfaces, defining arborescent surfaces.

Nonorientable spanning surfaces of periodic knots can have arbitrarily high first Betti number.

A classification of spanning surfaces for alternating links is provided up to genus, orientability, and a new invariant that we call aggregate slope. That is, given an alternating link, we determine all possible combinations of genus, orientability, and aggregate slope that a surface spanning that link can have. To thi…

We use the methods of Hedden, Juhasz, and Sarkar to exhibit a set of arborescent knots that bound large numbers of non-isotopic minimal genus spanning surfaces. In particular, we describe a sequence of prime knots K_{n} which will bound at least 2^{2n-1} non-isotopic minimal spanning surfaces of genus n.

New invariants for virtual knots via spanning surfaces.

Non-spanning identification of scheduled event risk in option pricing.

For a given boundary set consisting of arcs and vertices, with two or more arcs meeting at each vertex, we treat the problem of estimating the area density of a soap film-like surface spanning the boundary.

We study the asymptotic expansion of the determinant of the graph Laplacian associated to discretizations of a half-translation surface endowed with a flat unitary vector bundle. By doing so, over the discretizations, we relate the asymptotic expansion of the number of spanning trees and the sum of cycle-rooted spannin…

Plateau's problem is to find a surface with minimal area spanning a given boundary. In 1960, Reifenberg and Adams developed a definition for "span" using Čech homology, and variants of this definition have been used ever sense. However, limitations of Čech homology resulted in the lack of a natural definition for a bou…

By using a suitable triple cover we show how to possibly model the construction of a minimal surface with positive genus spanning all six edges of a tetrahedron, working in the space of BV functions and interpreting the film as the boundary of a Caccioppoli set in the covering space. After a question raised by R. Hardt…

This note gives the first example of a hyperbolic knot in the 3-sphere that lacks a nonorientable essential spanning surface; this disproves the Strong Neuwirth Conjecture formulated by Ozawa and Rubinstein. Moreover, this knot has no even strict boundary slopes, disproving the Even Boundary Slope Conjecture of the sam…

We establish an asymptotic relation between the spectrum of the discrete Laplacian associated to discretizations of a half-translation surface with a flat unitary vector bundle and the spectrum of the Friedrichs extension of the Laplacian with von Neumann boundary conditions. As an interesting byproduct of our study, w…

We study a canonical spanning surface obtained from a knot or link diagram depending on a given Kauffman state, and give a sufficient condition for the surface to be essential. By using the essential surface, we can see the triviality and splittability of a knot or link from its diagrams. This has been done on the exte…

Extends Gordon-Litherland pairing to links in thickened surfaces, defining new invariants.

In this paper we study embeddings of oriented connected closed surfaces in $\mathbb S^3$. We define a complete invariant, the fundamental span, for such embeddings, generalizing the notion of the peripheral system of a knot group. From the fundamental span, several computable invariants are derived and employed to stud…

Oriented ribbon graphs (dessins d'enfant) are graphs embedded in oriented surfaces. A quasi-tree of a ribbon graph is a spanning subgraph with one face, which is described by an ordered chord diagram. We show that for any link diagram $L$, there is an associated ribbon graph whose quasi-trees correspond bijectively to …

In this paper we provide the first examples of non-flat soap films proven to span tetrahedra. These are members of a continuous two parameter family of soap films with tetrahedral boundaries. Of particular interest is a two parameter subfamily where each spanning soap film has the property that two minimal surfaces mee…

The paper finds surfaces closest to being flat that span a given contour.

We show for an alternating knot the minimal boundary slope of an essential spanning surface is given by the signature plus twice the minimum degree of the Jones polynomial and the maximal boundary slope of an essential spanning surface is given by the signature plus twice the maximum degree of the Jones polynomial. For…

Let $M$ be an $n$-dimensional complete simply connected Riemannian manifold with sectional curvature bounded above by a nonpositive constant $-κ^2$. Using the cone total curvature $TC(Γ)$ of a graph $Γ$ which was introduced by Gulliver and Yamada Math. Z. 2006, we prove that the density at any point of a soap film-like…

New method uses rational Witt span to bound concordance crosscap number of knots.

Minimal surfaces span periodic curves in 3D space.

In this paper we investigate the life-span of classical solutions to the hyperbolic geometric flow in two space variables with slow decay initial data. By establishing some new estimates on the solutions of linear wave equations in two space variables, we give a lower bound of the life-span of classical solutions to th…

For a knot $K$, Kakimizu introduced a simplicial complex whose vertices are all the isotopy classes of minimal genus spanning surfaces for $K$. The first purpose of this paper is to prove the 1-skeleton of this complex has diameter bounded by a function quadratic in knot genus, whenever $K$ is atoroidal. The second pur…

In mathematics, the classical Plateau problem consists of finding the surface of least area that spans a given rigid boundary curve. A physical realization of the problem is obtained by dipping a stiff wire frame of some given shape in soapy water and then removing it; the shape of the spanning soap film is a solution …

We investigate solutions to the minimal surface problem with Dirichlet boundary conditions in the roto-translation group equipped with a subRiemannian metric. By work of G. Citti and A. Sarti, such solutions are amodal completions of occluded visual data when using a model of the first layer of the visual cortex. Using…

We survey Mirzakhani's work relating to Riemann surfaces, which spans about 20 papers. We target the discussion at a broad audience of non-experts.

We introduce a Kauffman-Jones type polynomial $\mathcal{L}_γ(A)$ for a curve $γ$ on an oriented surface, whose endpoints are on the boundary of the surface. The polynomial $\mathcal{L}_γ(A)$ is a Laurent polynomial in one variable $A$ and is an invariant of the homotopy class of $γ$. As an application, we obtain an est…

The Kauffman bracket skein module $S(M)$ of a 3-manifold $M$ is a $\mathbb{Q}(A)$-vector space spanned by links in $M$ modulo the so-called Kauffman relations. In this article, for any closed oriented surface $Σ$ we provide an explicit spanning family for the skein modules $S(Σ\times S^1)$. Combined with earlier work o…

We derive bounds on the length of the meridian and the cusp volume of hyperbolic knots in terms of the topology of essential surfaces spanned by the knot. We provide an algorithmically checkable criterion that guarantees that the meridian length of a hyperbolic knot is below a given bound. As applications we find knot …

It is shown that there exist alternating non-Montesinos knots whose essential spanning surfaces with maximal and minimal boundary slopes are not realised by the checkerboard surfaces coming from a reduced alternating planar diagram.

We show that for any extreme curve in a 3-manifold M, there exist a canonical mean convex hull containing all least area disks spanning the curve. Similar result is true for asymptotic case in hyperbolic 3-space such that for any asymptotic curve, there is a canonical mean convex hull containing all minimal planes span…

The Plateau-Douglas problem asks to find an area minimizing surface of fixed or bounded genus spanning a given finite collection of Jordan curves in Euclidean space. In the present paper we solve this problem in the setting of proper metric spaces admitting a local quadratic isoperimetric inequality for curves. We more…

We study a problem of geometric graph theory: We determine the triply periodic graph in Euclidean 3-space which minimizes length among all graphs spanning a fundamental domain of 3-space with the same volume. The minimizer is the so-called srs network with quotient the complete graph on four vertices $K_4$. The network…

We construct a Riemannian metric $g$ on $\mathbb{R}^4$ (arbitrarily close to the euclidean one) and a smooth simple closed curve $Γ\subset \mathbb R^4$ such that the unique area minimizing surface spanned by $Γ$ has infinite topology. Furthermore the metric is almost Kähler and the area minimizing surface is calibrated…

We define a geometric flow that is designed to change surfaces of cylindrical type spanning two disjoint boundary curves into solutions of the Douglas-Plateau problem of finding minimal surfaces with given boundary curves. We prove that also in this new setting and for arbitrary initial data, solutions of the Teichmüll…

Study invariants of null-homologous knots in thickened surfaces.

Oriented ribbon graphs (dessins d'enfant) are graphs embedded in oriented surfaces. The Bollobás-Riordan-Tutte polynomial is a three-variable polynomial that extends the Tutte polynomial to oriented ribbon graphs. A quasi-tree of a ribbon graph is a spanning subgraph with one face, which is described by an ordered chor…

We show that any twisted Dijkgraaf-Witten representation of a mapping class group of an orientable, compact surface with boundary has finite image. This generalizes work of Etingof, Rowell and Witherspoon showing that the braid group images are finite. In particular, our result answers their question regarding finitene…

Let $L$ be a non-split prime alternating link with $n>0$ crossings. We show that for each fixed $g$, the number of genus-$g$ Seifert surfaces for $L$ is bounded by an explicitly given polynomial in $n$. The result also holds for all spanning surfaces of fixed Euler characteristic. Previously known bounds were exponenti…

We construct the first example of a 5-dimensional simply connected compact manifold that admits a K-contact structure but does not admit a semi-regular Sasakian structure. For this, we need two ingredients: (a) to construct a suitable simply connected symplectic 4-manifold with disjoint symplectic surfaces spanning the…

Motivated by the study of the equilibrium equations for a soap film hanging from a wire frame, we prove a compactness theorem for surfaces with asymptotically vanishing mean curvature and fixed or converging boundaries. In particular, we obtain sufficient geometric conditions for the minimal surfaces spanned by a given…

In this paper we present an algorithm to reduce the area of a surface spanned by a finite number of boundary curves by initiating a variational improvement in the surface. The ansatz we suggest consists of original surface plus a variational parameter $t$ multiplying the numerator $H_{0}$ of mean curvature function def…

Gordon and Litherland showed that all compact, unoriented, possibly non-orientable surfaces in $S^3$ bounded by a link are realted by attaching/deleting tubes and half twisted bands. In this note we give an elementary proof for this result.

We introduce Khovanov homology for ribbon graphs and show that the Khovanov homology of a certain ribbon graph embedded on the Turaev surface of a link is isomorphic to the Khovanov homology of the link (after a grading shift). We also present a spanning quasi-tree model for the Khovanov homology of a ribbon graph.