In joint work with J. Rasmussen, we gave an interpretation of Heegaard Floer homology for manifolds with torus boundary in terms of immersed curves in a punctured torus. In particular, knot Floer homology is captured by this invariant. Appealing to earlier work of the authors on bordered Floer homology, we give a formula for the behaviour of these immersed curves under cabling.
The unknotting number of knots is a difficult quantity to compute, and even its behavior under basic satelliting operations is not understood. We establish a lower bound on the unknotting number of cable knots and iterated cable knots purely in terms of the winding number of the pattern. The proof uses Alishahi-Eftekhary's bounds on unknotting number from knot Floer homology together with Hanselman-Watson's computation of the knot Floer homology of cables in terms of immersed curves in the punctured torus.
We determine the relationship between the contact structure induced by a fibered knot, K, in the three-sphere and the contact structures induced by its various cables. Understanding this relationship allows us to classify fibered cable knots which bound a properly embedded complex curve in the four-ball satisfying a genus constraint. This generalizes the well-known classification of links of plane curve singularities.
We continue our study of the knot Floer homology invariants of cable knots. For large |n|, we prove that many of the filtered subcomplexes in the knot Floer homology filtration associated to the (p,pn+1) cable of a knot, K, are isomorphic to those of K. This result allows us to obtain information about the behavior of the Ozsvath-Szabo concordance invariant under cabling, which has geometric consequences for the cabling operation. Applications considered include quasipositivity in the braid group, the knot theory of complex curves, smooth concordance, and lens space (or, more generally, L-spac…
We introduce a new cohomology-theoretic method for classifying generic immersed curves in closed compact surfaces by using Gauss codes. This subsumes a result of J.S. Carter on classifying immersed curves in oriented compact surfaces, and provides a criterion for when an immersion is two-colorable. We note an application to twisted virtual link theory.
In 2001, Oestlund conjectured that Reidemeister moves 1 and 3 are sufficient to describe a homotopy from any generic immersion from the circle into the plane to the standard embedding of the circle. We show that this conjecture is false.
For any chord diagram on a circle there exists a complete graph on sufficiently many vertices such that any generic immersion of it to the plane contains a plane closed curve whose chord diagram contains the given chord diagram as a sub-chord diagram. For any generic immersion of the complete graph on six vertices to the plane the sum of averaged invariants of all Hamiltonian plane curves in it is congruent to one quarter modulo one half.
Suppose $δ$ is a generic immersed closed curve in the boundary of a 3-manifold M and $δ$ is null-homotopic in M. Then $δ$ can be displaced by a height function in a collar of the boundary so that the resulting simple closed curve in the collar bounds a disk in M.
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 proper open interval. In this article we prove that, under certain circumstances for endpoints and end directions, these subspaces are not homotopically equivalent to the whole space. Moreover, we give an explicit construction of exotic generators for some homotopy and cohomology …
Colorado State University Pueblo(科罗拉多州立大学普韦布洛分校);Saginaw Valley State University(萨吉诺谷州立大学);Louisiana State University(路易斯安那州立大学);Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, State University of New York(纽约州立大学西蒙斯几何与物理中心)
A few years ago N.A'Campo invented a construction of a link from a real curve immersed into a disk. In the case of the curve originating from the real morsification method the link is isotopic to the link of the corresponding singularity. There are some curves which do not occur in the singularity theory. In this article we describe the Casson invariant of A'Campo's knots as a J^{+/-}-type invariant of the immersed curves. Thus we get an integral generalization of the Gusein-Zade--Natanzon theorem which says that the Arf invariant of a singularity is equal to J^{-}/2(mod 2) of the correspondin…
Among other things, we prove the following two topologcal statements about closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds. First, every rational second homology class of a closed hyperbolic 3-manifold has a positve integral multiple represented by an oriented connected closed $π_1$-injectively immersed quasi-Fuchsian subsurface. Second, every rationally null-homologous, $π_1$-injectively immersed oriented closed 1-submanifold in a closed hyperbolic 3-manifold has an equidegree finite cover which bounds an oriented compact $π_1$-injective immersed quasi-Fuchsian subsurface. In part, we exploit techniques develo…
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 being Gauss codes of self-crossing plane curves. Our proof uses a result of Lippner and we further generalize the ideas of Fraysseix and Ossona de Mendez, which leads us to directed interlacement graphs of paired trees and their local complementation.
Let $Σ$ be a surface of negative Euler characteristic and $S$ a generating set for $π_1(Σ,p)$ consisting of simple loops that are pairwise disjoint (except at $p$). We show that the word length with respect to $S$ of an element of $π_1(Σ,p)$ is given by its intersection number with a well-chosen collection of curves and arcs on $Σ$. The same holds for the word length of (a free homotopy class of) an immersed curve on $Σ$. As a consequence, we obtain the asymptotic growth of the number of immersed curves of bounded word length, as the length grows, in each mapping class group orbit.
We give a geometric interpretation of Bar-Natan's universal invariant for the class of tangles in the 3-ball with four ends: we associate with such 4-ended tangles $T$ multicurves $\widetilde{\operatorname{BN}}(T)$, that is, collections of immersed curves with local systems in the 4-punctured sphere. These multicurves are tangle invariants up to homotopy of the underlying curves and equivalence of the local systems. They satisfy a gluing theorem which recovers the reduced Bar-Natan homology of links in terms of wrapped Lagrangian Floer theory. Furthermore, we use $\widetilde{\operatorname{BN}}…
We construct an algebraic version of Lagrangian Floer homology for immersed curves inside the pillowcase. We first associate to the pillowcase an algebra A. Then to an immersed curve L inside the pillowcase we associate an A infinity module M(L) over A. Then we prove that Lagrangian Floer homology HF(L,L') is isomorphic to a suitable algebraic pairing of modules M(L) and M(L'). This extends the pillowcase homology construction - given a 2-stranded tangle inside a 3-ball, if one obtains an immersed unobstructed Lagrangian inside the pillowcase, one can further associate an A infinity module to …
We study configurations of immersed curves in surfaces and surfaces in 3-manifolds. Among other results, we show that primitive curves have only finitely many configurations which minimize the number of double points. We give examples of minimal configurations not realized by geodesics in any hyperbolic metric.
We explicitly calculate the fundamental group of the space $\mathcal F$ of all immersed closed curves on a surface $F$. It is shown that $π_n(\mathcal F)=0$, n>1 for $F\neq S^2, RP^2$. It is also proved that $π_2(\mathcal F)=\Z$, and $π_n(\mathcal F)=π_n(S^2)\oplusπ_{n+1}(S^2)$, n>2, for $F$ equal to $S^2$ or $RP^2$.