arXiv research

New 5-manifold without 'spine' challenges deformation conjecture.

Using a cell model for the little discs operad in terms of spineless cacti we give a minimal common topological operadic formalism for three a priori disparate algebraic structures: (1) a solution to Deligne's conjecture on the Hochschild complex, (2) the Hopf algebra of Connes and Kreimer, and (3) the string topology …

Motivated by string topology and the arc operad, we introduce the notion of quasi-operads and consider four (quasi)-operads which are different varieties of the operad of cacti. These are cacti without local zeros (or spines) and cacti proper as well as both varieties with fixed constant size one of the constituting lo…

We demonstrate new applications of the trace embedding lemma to the study of piecewise-linear surfaces and the detection of exotic phenomena in dimension four. We provide infinitely many pairs of homeomorphic 4-manifolds $W$ and $W'$ homotopy equivalent to $S^2$ which have smooth structures distinguished by several for…

We construct infinitely many smooth 4-manifolds which are homotopy equivalent to $S^2$ but do not admit a spine, i.e., a piecewise-linear embedding of $S^2$ which realizes the homotopy equivalence. This is the remaining case in the existence problem for codimension-2 spines in simply-connected manifolds. The obstructio…

A 2018 paper by A. Levine and T. Lidman outlines a proof of the following interesting result in topology of manifolds: there is a compact smooth 4-manifold $W$ with boundary such that $W$ is homotopy equivalent to $S^2$ but there does not exist an embedding $S^2\to W$ which is a homotopy equivalence and is simplicial f…

Defines action on knot spaces using cacti and cubes.