A shadowed polyhedron is a simple polyhedron equipped with half integers on regions, called gleams, which represents a compact, oriented, smooth 4-manifold. The polyhedron is embedded in the 4-manifold and it is called a shadow of that manifold. A subpolyhedron of a shadow represents a possibly singular subsurface in the 4-manifold. In this paper, we focus on contractible shadows obtained from the unit disk by attaching annuli along generically immersed closed curves on the disk. In this case, the 4-manifold is always a 4-ball. Milnor fibers of plane curve singularities and complexified real line arrangements can be represented in this way. We give a presentation of the fundamental group of the complement of a subpolyhedron of such a shadow in the 4-ball. The method is very similar to the Wirtinger presentation of links in knot theory.
We study the set of all closed oriented smooth 4-manifolds experimentally, according to a suitable complexity defined using Turaev's shadows. This complexity roughly measures how complicated the 2-skeleton of the 4-manifold is. We characterise here all the closed oriented 4-manifolds that have complexity at most one. They are generated by a certain set of 20 blocks, that are some basic 4-manifolds with boundary consisting of copies of $S^2 \times S^1$, plus connected sums with some copies of $\mathbb{CP}^2$ with either orientation. All the manifolds generated by these blocks are doubles. Many …
We study the asymptotic expansion conjecture of the relative Reshetikhin-Turaev invariants proposed in \cite{WY4} for all pairs $(M,L)$ satisfying the property that $M\setminus L$ is homeomorphic to some fundamental shadow link complement. The hyperbolic cone structure of such $(M,L)$ can be described by using the logarithmic holonomies of the meridians of some fundamental shadow link. We show that when the logarithmic holonomies are sufficiently small and all cone angles are less than $π$, the asymptotic expansion conjecture of $(M,L)$ is true. Especially, we verify the asymptotic expansion c…
We use purely topological tools to construct several infinite families of hyperbolic links in the 3-sphere that satisfy the Turaev-Viro invariant volume conjecture posed by Chen and Yang. To show that our links satisfy the volume conjecture, we prove that each has complement homeomorphic to the complement of a fundamental shadow link. These are links in connected sums of copies of $S^2 \times S^1$ for which the conjecture is known due to Belletti, Detcherry, Kalfagianni, and Yang. Our methods also verify the conjecture for several hyperbolic links with crossing number less than twelve. In addi…
We generalize presentations of the fundamental group of discriminant complements and arrive at a class of presentations associated naturally with words in the free monoid of the alphabet $σ_1,\dots,σ_{n-1}$. Our study addresses invariance properties of these presentations and the presented groups under various operations on the words. In particular we prove that the group does only depend on the corresponding element in the positive braid monoid, and under mild hypotheses only on its conjugacy class in the braid group.
We introduce generalized arrow diagrams and generalized Reidemeister moves for diagrams of links in Seifert fibered spaces. We give a presentation of the fundamental group of the link complement. As a corollary we are able to compute the first homology group of the complement and the twisted Alexander polynomials of the link.
The computation of the fundamental group of the complement of an algebraic plane curve has been theoretically solved since Zariski-van Kampen, but actual computations are usually cumbersome. In this work, we describe the notion of Wirtinger presentation of such a group relying on the real picture of the curve and with the same combinatorial flavor as the classical Wirtinger presentation; we determine a significant family of curves for which Wirtinger presentation provides the required fundamental group. The above methods allow us to compute that fundamental group for an infinite subfamily of h…
For an arbitrary positive integer $n$ and a pair $(p, q)$ of coprime integers, consider $n$ copies of a torus $(p,q)$ knot placed parallel to each other on the surface of the corresponding auxiliary torus: we call this assembly a torus $n$-link. We compute economical presentations of knot groups for torus links using the groupoid version of the Seifert--van Kampen theorem. Moreover, the result for an individual torus $n$-link is generalized to the case of multiple "nested" torus links, where we inductively include a torus link in the interior (or the exterior) of the auxiliary torus correspond…
Let G be the fundamental group of the complement of the torus knot of type (m,n). This has a presentation G=<x,y|x^m=y^n>. We find the geometric description of the character variety X(G) of characters of representations of G into SL(3,C), GL(3,C) and PGL(3,C).
Let A be a line arrangement in the complex projective plane CP2. We define and describe the inclusion map of the boundary manifold --the boundary of a close regular neighborhood of A-- in the exterior of the arrangement. We obtain two explicit descriptions of the map induced on the fundamental groups. These computations provide a new minimal presentation of the fundamental group of the complement.
