We prove that, like the Seiberg-Witten monopole homology, the Heegaard Floer homology for a three-manifold determines its Thurston norm. As a consequence, we show that knot Floer homology detects the genus of a knot. This leads to new proofs of certain results previously obtained using Seiberg-Witten monopole Floer homology (in collaboration with Kronheimer and Mrowka). It also leads to a purely Morse-theoretic interpretation of the genus of a knot. The method of proof shows that the canonical element of Heegaard Floer homology associated to a weakly symplectically fillable contact structure is non-trivial. In particular, for certain three-manifolds, Heegaard Floer homology gives obstructions to the existence of taut foliations.
We show that all GL(2, R)-equivariant point markings over orbit closures of primitive genus two translation surfaces arise from marking pairs of points exchanged by the hyperelliptic involution, Weierstrass points, or the golden points in the golden eigenform locus. As corollaries, we classify the holomorphically varying families of points over orbifold covers of genus two Hilbert modular surfaces, solve the finite blocking problem on genus two translation surfaces, and show that there is at most one nonarithmetic rank two orbit closure in the minimal stratum in genus four.
We describe a Lefschetz fibration of genus one on the disk cotangent bundle of any closed orientable surface S. As a corollary, we obtain an explicit genus one open book decomposition adapted to the canonical contact structure on the unit cotangent bundle of S.
In this paper, we classify relatively minimal genus-$1$ holomorphic Lefschetz pencils up to smooth isomorphism. We first show that such a pencil is isomorphic to either the pencil on $\mathbb{P}^1\times \mathbb{P}^1$ of bi-degree $(2,2)$ or a blow-up of the pencil on $\mathbb{P}^2$ of degree $3$, provided that no fiber of a pencil contains an embedded sphere. (Note that one can easily classify genus-$1$ Lefschetz pencils with an embedded sphere in a fiber.) We further determine the monodromy factorizations of these pencils and show that the isomorphism class of a blow-up of the pencil on $\mat…
In this paper we discuss topological properties of holomorphic Lefschetz pencils on the four-torus. Relying on the theory of moduli spaces of polarized abelian surfaces, we first prove that, under some mild assumption, the (smooth) isomorphism class of a holomorphic Lefschetz pencil on the four-torus is uniquely determined by its genus and divisibility. We then explicitly give a system of vanishing cycles of the genus-3 holomorphic Lefschetz pencil on the four-torus due to Smith, and obtain those of holomorphic pencils with higher genera by taking finite unbranched coverings. One can also obta…
In this article, we provide bounds on systoles associated to a holomorphic $1$-form $ω$ on a Riemann surface $X$. In particular, we show that if $X$ has genus two, then, up to homotopy, there are at most $10$ systolic loops on $(X,ω)$ and, moreover, that this bound is realized by a unique translation surface up to homothety. For general genus $g$ and a holomorphic 1-form $ω$ with one zero, we provide the optimal upper bound, $6g-3$, on the number of homotopy classes of systoles. If, in addition, $X$ is hyperelliptic, then we prove that the optimal upper bound is $6g-5$.
In this article, we generalize the results discussed in [arXiv:1004.3762] by introducing a genus to generic fibers of Lefschetz fibrations. That is, we give families of relations in the mapping class groups of genus-1 surfaces with boundaries that represent rational homology disk smoothings of weighted homogeneous surface singularities whose resolution graphs are $3$-legged with a bad central vertex.
For every integer $g \,\geq\, 2$ we show the existence of a compact Riemann surface $Σ$ of genus $g$ such that the rank two trivial holomorphic vector bundle ${\mathcal O}^{\oplus 2}_Σ$ admits holomorphic connections with $\text{SL}(2,{\mathbb R})$ monodromy and maximal Euler class. Such a monodromy representation is known to coincide with the Fuchsian uniformizing representation for some Riemann surface of genus $g$. The construction carries over to all very stable and compatible real holomorphic structures for the topologically trivial rank two bundle over $Σ$ and gives the existence of holo…
We show that the disk complex of a genus $g>1$ Heegaard surface for the 3-sphere is homotopy equivalent to a wedge of $(2g-2)$-dimensional spheres. This implies that genus $g>1$ Heegaard surfaces for the 3-sphere are topologically minimal with index $2g-1$.
We show that the asymptotic dimension of a hyperbolic relatively hyperbolic graph is finite provided that this holds true uniformly for the peripheral subgraphs and for the electrifiation. We use this to show that the asymptotic dimension of the disk graph of a handlebody of genus at least two is at most quadratic in the genus.