arXiv research

The paper details folding of branched covers of the 3-sphere over knots.

Study covers of sphere with homeomorphisms lifting property.

We show that Brieskorn manifolds with their standard contact structures are contact branched coverings of spheres. This covering maps a contact open book decomposition of the Brieskorn manifold onto a Milnor open book of the sphere.

Taut foliations map leaves to branched 2-sphere covers.

Study involutions on 3D small covers, proving quotient spaces are linked 2-spheres.

We characterize the cyclic branched covers of the 2-sphere where every homeomorphism of the sphere lifts to a homeomorphism of the covering surface. This answers a question that appeared in an early version of the erratum of Birman and Hilden [2].

Cyclic covers of knots uniquely determine the original knot.

In this paper we show that for m>n the set of cobordism classes of maps from m-sphere to n-sphere is trivial. The determination of the cobordism homotopy groups of spheres admits applications to the covers for spheres.

We present a new proof of the sphere covering inequality in the spirit of comparison geometry, and as a byproduct we find another sphere covering inequality which can be viewed as the dual of the original one. We also prove sphere covering inequalities on surfaces satisfying general isoperimetric inequalities, and disc…

A subset of the sphere is said short if it is contained in an open hemisphere. A short closed set which is geodesically convex is called a cap. The following theorem holds: 1. The minimal number of short closed sets covering the $n$-sphere is $n+2$. 2. If $n+2$ short closed sets cover the $n$-sphere then (i) their inte…

A filling Dehn surface in a $3$-manifold $M$ is a generically immersed surface in $M$ that induces a cellular decomposition of $M$. Given a tame link $L$ in $M$ there is a filling Dehn sphere of $M$ that "trivializes" (\emph{diametrically splits}) it. This allows to construct filling Dehn surfaces in the coverings of $…

Techniques for constructing codimension 2 embeddings and immersions of the 2 and 3-fold branched covers of the 3 and 4-dimensional spheres are presented. These covers are in braided form, and it is in this sense that they are folded. More precisely the composition of the embedding (or immersion) and the canonical proje…

New criterion for branched covers between 2-spheres.

It was shown in my earlier article that the splice diagram of a rational homology sphere graph manifold determines the manifolds universal abelian cover. In this article we use the proof of this to give a condition on the splice diagram to determine when the universal abelian cover itself is a rational homology sphere.

Prove realizability of genus-0 branch data for tetrahedral coverings of the sphere.

Many three dimensional manifolds are two-fold branched covers of the three dimensional sphere. However, there are some that are not. This paper includes exposition about two-fold branched covers and many examples. It shows that there are three dimensional homology spheres that do not two-fold branched cover any manifol…

Harmonic maps from surfaces to CAT(k) spheres are branched coverings.

We study the linking numbers in a rational homology 3-sphere and in the infinite cyclic cover of the complement of a knot. They take values in $\Bbb Q$ and in ${Q}({\Bbb Z}[t,t^{-1}])$ respectively, where ${Q}({\Bbb Z}[t,t^{-1}])$ denotes the quotient field of ${\Bbb Z}[t,t^{-1}]$. It is known that the modulo-$\Bbb Z$ …

Compactifies the space of branched coverings of the sphere.

In this note we provide natural optimal geometric conditions for a Riemannian manifold suitably covered by two open metric balls to be homeomorphic to a sphere. This can be viewed as a geometric analogue of Brown's theorem in topology stating that a closed manifold covered by two topological balls is a sphere.

For a given branched covering between closed connected surfaces, there are several easy relations one can establish between the Euler characteristics of the surfaces, their orientability, the total degree, and the local degrees at the branching points, including the classical Riemann-Hurwitz formula. These necessary re…

Generalized Thurston's characterization for branched coverings of the 2-sphere.

With any (open or closed) cover of a space T we associate certain homotopy classes of maps T into n-spheres. These homotopy invariants can be considered as obstructions for extensions of covers of a subspace A to a space X. We using these obstructions for generalizations of the classic KKM (Knaster-Kuratowski-Mazurkiew…

The paper studies liftable mapping class groups of cyclic covers of spheres.

In this paper we show that periodic Takahashi 3-manifolds are cyclic coverings of the connected sum of two lens spaces (possibly cyclic coverings of the 3-sphere), branched over knots. When the base space is a 3-sphere, we prove that the associated branching set is a two-bridge knot of genus one, and we determine its t…

3-manifolds are chiral if not finitely covered by sphere or product.

We show that the commutator subgroup G' of a classical knot group G need not have subgroups of every finite index, but it will if G' has a surjective homomorphism to the integers and we give an exact criterion for that to happen. We also give an example of a smoothly knotted n-sphere in the (n+2)-sphere for all n at le…

One method for obtaining every closed orientable 3-manifold is as branched covering of the 3-sphere over a link. There is a classical topological result showing that the minimun possible number of sheets in the covering is three. In this paper we obtain a geometric version of this result. The interest is given by the g…

We provide related Dehn surgery descriptions for rational homology spheres and a class of their regular finite cyclic covering spaces. As an application, we use the surgery descriptions to relate the Casson invariants of the covering spaces to that of the base space. Finally, we show that this places restrictions on th…

Let M be a smooth 4-manifold which admits a relatively minimal hyperelliptic genus h Lefschetz fibration over the 2-sphere. If all of the vanishing cycles for this fibration are nonseparating curves, then we show that M is a 2-fold cover of a 2-sphere bundle over the 2-sphere, branched over an embedded surface. If the …

Every closed oriented PL 4-manifold is a branched cover of the 4-sphere branched over a PL-surface with finitely many singularities by Piergallini [Topology 34(3):497-508, 1995]. This generalizes a long standing result by Hilden and Montesinos to dimension four. Izmestiev and Joswig [Adv. Geom. 3(2):191-225, 2003] gave…

Formula for Lefschetz number of knot branched covers.

It has long been known that every quasi-homogeneous normal complex surface singularity with Q-homology sphere link has universal abelian cover a Brieskorn complete intersection singularity. We describe a broad generalization: First, one has a class of complete intersection normal complex surface singularities called "s…

Study irreducible SU(2) representations for knots in 3D.

The branched virtual fibering theorem by Sakuma states that every closed orientable $3$-manifold with a Heegaard surface of genus $g$ has a branched double cover which is a genus $g$ surface bundle over the circle. It is proved by Brooks that such a surface bundle can be chosen to be hyperbolic. We prove that the minim…

We prove that any knot or link in any 3-manifold can be nicely decomposed (splitted) by a filling Dehn sphere. This has interesting consequences in the study of branched coverings over knots and links. We give an algorithm for computing Johansson diagrams of filling Dehn surfaces out from coverings of 3-manifolds branc…

Knots generating infinite subgroup bound rational homology balls.

Links with isotopic preimages in $S^3$ are isotopic in $RP^3$.

Study $p$-torsion growth in covers of 3-manifolds, proving Iwasawa formulas.

Extends Thurston's combinatorial characterization to all branched coverings of the 2-sphere.

The main theorem is that if K is a finite CW complex with finite fundamental group G and universal cover homotopy equivalent to a product of spheres X, then G acts smoothly and freely on X x S^n for any n greater than or equal to the dimension of X. If the G-action on the universal cover of K is homologically trivial t…

A construction of Kaehler-Einstein metrics using Galois coverings, studied by Arezzo-Ghigi-Pirola, is generalized to orbifolds. By applying it to certain orbifold covers of P^n which are trivial set theoretically, one obtains new Einstein metrics on odd-dimensional spheres. The method also gives Kaehler-Einstein metric…

We show that, for any prime p, a knot K in the 3-sphere is determined by its p-fold cyclic unbranched covering. We also investigate when the m-fold cyclic unbranched covering of a knot coincides with the n-fold cyclic unbranched covering of another knot, for different coprime integers m and n.

For any alternating knot, it is known that the double branched cover of the $3$-sphere branched over the knot is an $L$-space. We show that the three-fold cyclic branched cover is also an $L$-space for any genus one alternating knot.

Every open Riemann surface can be triangulated with equilateral triangles.

Using the covering involution on the double branched cover of the three-sphere branched along a knot, and adapting ideas of Hendricks-Manolescu and Hendricks-Hom-Lidman, we define new knot invariants and apply them to deduce novel linear independence results in the smooth concordance group of knots.

For a branched cover between two closed orientable surfaces, the Riemann-Hurwitz formula relates the Euler characteristics of the surfaces, the total degree of the cover, and the total length of the partitions of the degree given by the local degrees at the preimages of the branching points. A very old problem asks whe…

It is known that if any prime power branched cyclic cover of a knot in the 3-sphere is a homology sphere, then the knot has vanishing Casson-Gordon invariants. We construct infinitely many examples of (topologically) non-slice knots in the 3-sphere whose prime power branched cyclic covers are homology spheres. We show …