A left orderable completely metrizable topological group is exhibited containing Artin's braid group on infinitely many strands. The group is the mapping class group (rel boundary) of the closed unit disk with a sequence of interior punctures converging to the boundary. This resolves an issue suggested by work of Dehornoy.
We analyze the signature type of a cascade of periodic orbits associated to period doubling renormalizable maps of the two dimensional disk. The signature is a sequence of rational numbers which describes how periodic orbits turn each other and is invariant by topological conjugacies that preserve orientation. We prove that in the class of area contracting maps the signature cannot be a monotone sequence. This explains why classical examples of infinitely renormalizable maps due to Bowen, Franks and Young cannot be achieved by smooth dissipative maps showing that there are topological obstruct…
We construct infinitely many linearly independent quasi-homomorphisms on the mapping class group of a Riemann surface with genus at least two which vanish on a handlebody subgroup. As a corollary, we disprove a conjecture of Reznikov on bounded width in Heegaard splittings. Another corollary is that there are infinitely many linearly independent quasi-invariants on the Heegaard splittings of three-manifolds.
In this paper we construct some invariants of spatial graphs by disk-summing the constituent knots and show the delta edge-homotopy invariance of them. As an application, we show that there exist infinitely many slice spatial embeddings of a planar graph up to delta edge-homotopy, and there exist infinitely many boundary spatial embeddings of a planar graph up to delta edge-homotopy.
We give infinitely many examples of manifold-knot pairs (Y, J) such that Y bounds an integer homology ball, J does not bound a non-locally-flat PL-disk in any integer homology ball, but J does bound a smoothly embedded disk in a rational homology ball. The proof relies on formal properties of involutive Heegaard Floer homology.
In the first part of this paper we prove that the mapping class subgroups generated by the $D$-th powers of Dehn twists (with $D\geq 2$) along a sparse collection of simple closed curves on an orientable surface are right angled Artin groups. The second part is devoted to power quotients, i.e. quotients by the normal subgroup generated by the $D$-th powers of all elements of the mapping class groups. We show first that for infinitely many $D$ the power quotient groups are non-trivial. On the other hand, if $4g+2$ does not divide $D$ then the associated power quotient of the mapping class group…
Let $M$ be an orientable, irreducible $3$-manifold admitting a weakly reducible genus three Heegaard splitting as a minimal genus Heegaard splitting. In this article, we prove that if $[f]$, $[g]\in Mod(M)$ give the same correspondence between two isotopy classes of generalized Heegaard splittings consisting of two Heegaard splittings of genus two, say $[\mathbf{H}]\to[\mathbf{H}']$, then there exists a representative $h$ of the difference $[h]=[g]\cdot[f]^{-1}$ such that (i) $h$ preserves a suitably chosen embedding of the Heegaard surface $F'$ obtained by amalgamation from $\mathbf{H}'$ whic…
We study the maximal entropy per unit generator of push-point mapping classes on the punctured disk. Our work is motivated by fluid mixing by rods in a planar domain. If a single rod moves among N-fixed obstacles, the resulting fluid diffeomorphism is in the push-point mapping class associated with the loop in π_1(D^2 - {N points}) traversed by the single stirrer. The collection of motions in each of which the stirrer goes around a single obstacle generate the group of push-point mapping classes, and the entropy efficiency with respect to these generators gives a topological measure of the mix…
In this paper we show that for a given 3-manifold and a given Heegaard splitting there are finitely many preferred decomposing systems of $3g - 3$ disjoint essential disks. These are characterized by a combinatorial criterion which is a slight strengthening of Casson-Gordon's rectangle condition. This is in contrast to fact that in general there can exist infinitely many such systems of disks which satisfy just the Casson-Gordon rectangle condition.
We prove that all maximal-tb Legendrian torus links (n,m) in the standard contact 3-sphere, except for (2,m),(3,3),(3,4) and (3,5), admit infinitely many Lagrangian fillings in the standard symplectic 4-ball. This is proven by constructing infinite order Lagrangian concordances which induce faithful actions of the modular group PSL(2,Z) and the mapping class group M(0,4) into the coordinate rings of algebraic varieties associated to Legendrian links. Our results imply that there exist Lagrangian concordance monoids with subgroups of exponential-growth, and yield Stein surfaces homotopic to a 2…
This is an addendum to arXiv: 0810.5376. We show, using our methods and an auxiliary result of Bestvina-Bromberg-Fujiwara, that a finitely generated group with infinitely many pairwise non-conjugate homomorphisms to a mapping class group virtually acts non-trivially on an $\R$-tree, and, if it is finitely presented, it virtually acts non-trivially on a simplicial tree
We construct (infinitely many) examples in all dimensions of contactomorphisms of closed overtwisted contact manifolds that are smoothly isotopic but not contact-isotopic to the identity.
We give an algorithm which produces infinitely many pairwise exotic Stein fillings of the same contact 3-manifolds, applying positive allowable Lefschetz fibrations over the disk. As a corollary, for a large class of Stein fillings, we realize the topological invariants (i.e. fundamental group, homology group, homology group of the boundary, and intersection form) of each filling as those of infinitely many pairwise exotic Stein fillings. Furthermore, applying the algorithm, we produce various contact 3-manifolds of support genus one each of which admits infinitely many pairwise exotic Stein f…
We describe sufficient conditions which guarantee that a finite set of mapping classes generate a right-angled Artin group quasi-isometrically embedded in the mapping class group. Moreover, under these conditions, the orbit map to Teichmuller space is a quasi-isometric embedding for both of the standard metrics. As a consequence, we produce infinitely many genus h surfaces (for any h at least 2) in the moduli space of genus g surfaces (for any g at least 3) for which the universal covers are quasi-isometrically embedded in the Teichmuller space.
It has been known since the time of Nielsen that the mapping class group $\text{Mod}_{g,1}$ of a surface of genus $g$ and one puncture acts faithfully by homeomorphisms on the circle. In this note, we show that this standard representation of the mapping class group is not rigid, precisely, if $G<\text{Mod}_{g,1}$ is a finite index subgroup then there exist infinitely many non--conjugate faithful representations $G\to \text{Homeo}^+(S^1)$. We thus answer a question of B. Farb.
Our main result is that the image of the quantum representation of a central extension of the mapping class group of the genus $g\geq 3$ closed orientable surface at a prime $p\geq 5$ is a Zariski dense discrete subgroup of some higher rank algebraic semi-simple Lie group $\mathbb G_p$ defined over $\Q$. As an application we find that, for any prime $p\geq 5$ a central extension of the genus $g$ mapping class group surjects onto the finite groups $\mathbb G_p(\Z/q\Z)$, for all but finitely many primes $q$. This method provides infinitely many finite quotients of a given mapping class group out…
Algebraic structure of the group of pseudo-isotopy classes of diffeomorphisms of the trivial disk bundle over the standard sphere which restrict to the identity map on the boundary is determined.
The purpose of this note is to explain a combinatorial description of closed smooth oriented 4-manifolds in terms of positive Dehn twist factorizations of surface mapping classes, and further explore these connections. This is obtained via monodromy representations of simplified broken Lefschetz fibrations on 4-manifolds, for which we provide an extension of Hurwitz moves that allows us to uniquely determine the isomorphism class of a broken Lefschetz fibration. We furthermore discuss broken Lefschetz fibrations whose monodromies are contained in special subgroups of the mapping class group; n…
Thurston's circle packing approximation of the Riemann Mapping (proven to give the Riemann Mapping in the limit by Rodin-Sullivan) is largely based on the theorem that any topological disk with a circle packing metric can be deformed into a circle packing metric in the disk with boundary circles internally tangent to the circle. The main proofs of the uniformization use hyperbolic volumes (Andreev) or hyperbolic circle packings (by Beardon and Stephenson). We reformulate these problems into a Euclidean context, which allows more general discrete conformal structures and boundary conditions. Th…