We prove that the canonical 4-dimensional surgery problems can be solved after passing to a double cover. This contrasts the long-standing conjecture about the validity of the topological surgery theorem for arbitrary fundamental groups (without passing to a cover). As a corollary, the surgery conjecture is reformulated in terms of the existence of free involutions on a certain class of 4-manifolds. We consider this question and analyze its relation to the A,B-slice problem.
We use equivariant surgery to classify all involutions on closed surfaces, up to isomorphism. Work on this problem is classical, dating back to the nineteenth century, but some questions seem to have been left unanswered. We give a modern treatment that leads to a complete classification.
We use sutured manifold theory, essential laminations and essential branched surfaces to establish the upper bounds of distances between certain types of nonsimple Dehn surgery slopes. This is the revised version of an earlier preprint {\it Dehn surgery and simple manifolds.}
In this paper we extend Thurston's hyperbolic Dehn surgery theorem to a class of geometrically infinite hyperbolic 3-manifolds. As an application we prove a modest density theorem for Kleinian groups. We also discuss hyperbolic Dehn surgery on geometrically finite hypebolic cone-manifolds.
We discuss some consequences Fintushel-Stern `knot surgery' operation on 4-manifolds coming from its handlebody description. We give some generalizations of this operation and give a counterexample to their conjecture.
Fintushel-Stern's knot surgery gave many pairs of exotic manifolds, which are homeomorphic but non-diffeomorphic. We show that if an elliptic fibration has two parallel, oppositely oriented vanishing circles (for example $S^2\times S^2$ or Matsumoto's $S^4$), then the knot surgery gives rise to standard manifolds. The diffeomorphism can give an alternative proof that Scharlemann's manifold is standard (originally by Akbulut [Ak1]).
In this paper we will show that two surfaces of the same genus and homology class in a simply connected 4-manifold are concordant. We will show they are often topologically isotopic when their complements have cyclic fundamental group. Finally, we will show that if they are 0-concordant, then surgery on one is equivalent to surgery on the other.
In this article we prove that, if $X$ is a smooth $4$-manifold containing an embedded double node neighborhood, all knot surgery $4$-manifolds $X_K$ are mutually diffeomorphic to each other after a connected sum with $\mathbb{CP}^2$. Hence, by applying to the simply connected elliptic surface $E(n)$, we also show that every knot surgery $4$-manifold $E(n)_K$ is almost completely decomposable.
Even though the disk embedding theorem is not available in dimension 4 for free fundamental groups, some surgery problems may be shown to have topological solutions. We prove that surgery problems may be solved if one considers closed 4-manifolds and the intersection pairing is extended from the integers, and prove a related splitting result.
Let M be a closed 3-manifold obtained by Dehn surgery along the figure-eight knot. We give a formula of the Reisdemeisiter torsion of M for any irreducible SL(2;C)-representation. It is described as a rational expression of the trace of the image of the meridian.
We present new lower bounds on the complexity of Dehn surgery manifolds of knots, using our recent result on the Cheeger-Gromov rho invariants and triangulations. As an application, we give explicit examples of closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds with fixed first homology for which the gap between the Gromov norm and the complexity is arbitrarily large.
In this article we study Lefschetz fibration structures on knot surgery 4-manifolds obtained from an elliptic surface E(2) using Kanenobu knots $K$. As a result, we get an infinite family of simply connected mutually diffeomorphic 4-manifolds coming from a pair of inequivalent Kanenobu knots. We also obtain an infinite family of simply connected symplectic 4-manifolds, each of which admits more than one inequivalent Lefschetz fibration structures of the same generic fiber.
In this article we construct a family of knot surgery $4$-manifolds admitting arbitrarily many nonisomorphic Lefschetz fibration structures with the same genus fiber. We obtain such families by performing knot surgery on an elliptic surface $E(2)$ using connected sums of fibered knots obtained by Stallings twist from a slice knot $3_1 \sharp 3^*_1$. By comparing their monodromy groups induced from the corresponding monodromy factorizations, we show that they admit mutually nonisomorphic Lefschetz fibration structures.
Contact round surgery of contact 3-manifolds is introduced in this paper. By using this method, an alternative proof of the existence of a contact structure on any closed orientable 3-manifold is given. It is also proved that any contact structure on any closed orientable 3-manifold is constructed from the standard contact structure on the 3-dimensional sphere by contact round surgeries. For the proof, important operations in contact topology, the Lutz twist and the Giroux torsion, are described in terms of contact round surgeries.
We compute the effect of concordance surgery, a generalization of knot surgery defined using a self-concordance of a knot, on the Ozsváth-Szabó 4-manifold invariant. The formula involves the graded Lefschetz number of the concordance map on knot Floer homology. The proof uses the sutured Floer TQFT, and a version of sutured Floer homology perturbed by a 2-form.
We give two infinite families of examples of closed, orientable, irreducible 3-manifolds $M$ such that $b_1(M)=1$ and $π_1(M)$ has weight 1, but $M$ is not the result of Dehn surgery along a knot in the 3-sphere. This answers a question of Aschenbrenner, Friedl and Wilton, and provides the first examples of irreducible manifolds with $b_1=1$ that are known not to be surgery on a knot in the 3-sphere. One family consists of Seifert fibered 3-manifolds, while each member of the other family is not even homology cobordant to any Seifert fibered 3-manifold. None of our examples are homology cobord…
Let $X$ be a closed, simply-connected, smooth, spin 4-manifold whose intersection form is isomorphic to $n(-E_8)\bigoplus mH$, where $H$ is the hyperbolic form. In this paper, we prove that for $n$ such that $n\equiv 2 ~{\rm mod} ~4$, there exists a locally linear pseudofree $\mathbb{Z}_2$-action on $X$ which is nonsmoothable with respect to any possible smooth structure on $X$.
We show that given a 3-manifold $Y$ there is only a finite number of alternating knots $K \subset S^3$ such that $Y$ can be obtained by surgery on $K$. A very similar but somewhat not complete statement has been obtained in a recent preprint of Lackenby and Purcell.
Surgery triangles are an important computational tool in Floer homology. Given a connected oriented surface $Σ$, we consider the abelian group $K(Σ)$ generated by bordered 3-manifolds with boundary $Σ$, modulo the relation that the three manifolds involved in any surgery triangle sum to zero. We show that $K(Σ)$ is a finitely generated free abelian group and compute its rank. We also construct an explicit basis and show that it generates all bordered 3-manifolds in a certain stronger sense. Our basis is strictly contained in another finite generating set which was constructed previously by Bal…
We consider 3-manifolds admitting the action of an involution such that its space of orbits is homeomorphic to $S^3.$ Such involutions are called hyperelliptic as the manifolds admitting such an action. We consider finite groups acting on 3-manifolds and containing hyperelliptic involutions whose fixed-point set has $r>2$ components. In particular we prove that a simple group containing such an involution is isomorphic to $PSL(2,q)$ for some odd prime power $q$, or to one of four other small simple groups.
This paper is concerned with the problem of stable diffeomorphism classification of 4-manifolds obtained using the surgery on loops. The main theorem states that under the assumption that the normal 1-type of two 4-manifolds in question is the same, the only classifying invariant is the signature. In particular, in some cases, any two closed smooth 4-manifolds with a given fundamental group, obtained by the standard construction, are stably diffeomorphic.
It is shown that any closed three-manifold M obtained by integral surgery on a knot in the three-sphere can always be constructed from integral surgeries on a 3-component link L with each component being an unknot in the three-sphere. It is also interesting to notice that infinitely many different integral surgeries on the same link L could give the same three-manifold M.
We consider surgery moves along (n+1)-component Brunnian links in compact connected oriented 3-manifolds, where the framing of the each component is 1/k for k in Z. We show that no finite type invariant of degree < 2n-2 can detect such a surgery move. The case of two link-homotopic Brunnian links is also considered. We relate finite type invariants of integral homology spheres obtained by such operations to Goussarov-Vassiliev invariants of Brunnian links.
Suppose that the 3-manifold M is given by integral surgery along a link L in S^3. In the following we construct a stable map from M to the plane, whose singular set is canonically oriented. We obtain upper bounds for the minimal numbers of crossings and non-simple singularities and of connected components of fibers of stable maps from M to the plane in terms of properties of L.
When can one 3-manifold be transformed to another by a finite sequence of Dehn surgeries which are restricted to preserve the first homology of the manifolds ? What is the resulting equivalence relation on 3-manifolds ? What if the surgery circle is further restricted to lie more deeply in the lower central series of the fundamental group ? We answer these questions. It is shown that many of these questions have answers in terms of classical toplogical invariants. Relations with Heegard splittings and the Torelli group are discussed. This is also related to whether or not one 3-manifold may be…
Let $X$ be a connected compact 3-manifold with non-empty boundary. Consider the boundary $M$ of $X\times D^2$. $M$ is a 4-dimensional closed manifold and has the same fundamental group as $X$. Various examples of $X$ are known for which a certain assembly map $A:H_4(X;L)\to L_4(π_1(X))$ is injective. For such an $X$ and any CW-spine $B$ of $X$, there is a $UV^1$-map $p:M\to B$. For any $ε>0$, if the surgery obstruction for a TOP normal map $(f,b):N\to M$ vanishes, we can perform surgery on $f$ to change it into a $p^{-1}(ε)$-controlled homotopy equivalence.
For a fixed p, there are only finitely many elliptic 3-manifolds given by p/q-surgery on a knot in S^3. We prove this result by using the Heegaard Floer correction terms (d-invariants) to obstruct elliptic manifolds from arising as knot surgery.
A combinatorial condition is obtained for when immersed or embedded incompressible surfaces in compact 3-manifolds with tori boundary components remain incompressible after Dehn surgery. A combinatorial characterisation of hierarchies is described. A new proof is given of the topological rigidity theorem of Hass and Scott for 3-manifolds containing immersed incompressible surfaces, as found in cubings of non-positive curvature.
We give a survey of geometric approaches to the topological 4-dimensional surgery and 5-dimensional s-cobordism conjectures, with a focus on the study of surfaces in 4-manifolds. The geometric lemma underlying these conjectures is a statement about smooth immersions of disks and of certain 2-complexes, capped gropes, in a 4-manifold. We also mention a reformulation in terms of the A,B-slice problem, and the relation of this question to recent developments in the study of the classical knot concordance group.
For the purposes of this paper, Dehn surgery along a curve K in a 3-manifold M with slope r is `exceptional' if the resulting 3-manifold M_K(r) is reducible or a solid torus, or the core of the surgery solid torus has finite order in the fundamental group of M_K(r). We show that, providing the exterior of K is irreducible and atoroidal, and the distance between r and the meridian slope is more than one, and a homology condition is satisfied, then there is (up to ambient isotopy) only a finite number of such exceptional surgery curves in a given compact orientable 3-manifold M, with the boundar…
We use topological surgery in dimension four to give sufficient conditions for the zero framed surgery manifold of a 3-component link to be homology cobordant to the 3-torus, which arises from zero framed surgery on the Borromean rings, via a topological homology cobordism preserving the homotopy classes of the meridians. This enables us to give new examples of 3-component links with unknotted components and vanishing pairwise linking numbers, such that any two of these links have homology cobordant zero surgeries in the above sense, but the zero surgery manifolds are not homeomorphic. Moreove…
Given a simply-connected closed 4-manifold $X$ and a smoothly embedded oriented surface $Σ$, various constructions based on Fintushel-Stern knot surgery have produced new surfaces in $X$ that are pairwise homeomorphic to $Σ$, but not diffeomorphic. We prove that for all known examples of surface knots constructed from knot surgery operations that preserve the fundamental group of the complement of surface knots, they become pairwise diffeomorphic after stabilizing by connected summing with one $S^2\tilde{\times}S^2$. When $X$ is spin, we show in addition that any surfaces obtained by a knot su…
We give a description of degree-one maps between closed, oriented 3-manifolds in terms of surgery. Namely, we show that there is a degree-one map from a closed, oriented 3-manifold $M$ to a closed, oriented 3-manifold $N$ if and only if $M$ can be obtained from $N$ by surgery about a link in $N$ each of whose components is an unknot. We use this to interpret the existence of degree-one maps between closed 3-manifolds in terms of smooth 4-manifolds. More precisely, we show that there is a degree-one map from $M$ to $N$ if and only if there is a smooth embedding of $M$ in $W=(N\times I)#_n \bar{…
We show that, for any given 3-manifold M, there are at most finitely many hyperbolic knots K in the 3-sphere and fractions p/q (with q > 22), such that M is obtained by p/q surgery along K. This is a corollary of the following result. If M is obtained by Dehn filling the cusps of a hyperbolic 3-manifold X, where each filling slope has length more than 2 π+ ε, then, for any given M and ε> 0, there are only finitely many possibilities for X and for the filling slopes. In this paper, we also investigate the length of boundary slopes, and sequences of negatively curved metrics on a given 3-manifol…
A Dehn surgery on a knot $K$ in $S^3$ is exceptional if it produces a reducible, toroidal or Seifert fibred manifold. It is known that a large arborescent knot admits no such surgery unless it is a type II arborescent knot. The main theorem of this paper shows that up to isotopy there are exactly three large arborescent knots admitting exceptional surgery, each of which admits exactly one exceptional surgery, producing a toroidal manifold.
We study complexities of 3-manifolds defined from triangulations, Heegaard splittings, and surgery presentations. We show that these complexities are related by linear inequalities, by presenting explicit geometric constructions. We also show that our linear inequalities are asymptotically optimal. Our results are used in [arXiv:1405.1805] to estimate Cheeger-Gromov $L^2$ $ρ$-invariants in terms of geometric group theoretic and knot theoretic data.
Let M be a 3-manifold admitting a strongly irreducible Heegaard surface S and f:M \to M an involution. We construct an invariant Heegaard surface for M of genus at most 8 g(S) - 7. As a consequence, given a (possibly branched) double cover π:M \to N we obtain the following bound on the Heegaard genus of N: g(N) \leq 4g(S) - 3. We also get a bound on the complexity of the branch set in terms of g(S). If we assume that M is non-Haken, by Casson and Gordon we may replace g(S) by g(M) in all the statements above.
We investigate the operation of torus surgery on tori embedded in $S^4$. Key questions include which 4-manifolds can be obtained in this way, and the uniqueness of such descriptions. As an application we construct embeddings of 3-manifolds into 4-manifolds by viewing Dehn surgery as a cross section of a surgery on a surface. In particular, we give new embeddings of homology spheres into $S^4$.
In this paper we clarify an issue in the knot surgery construction of Fintushel and Stern. Using knot surgery, they construct an infinite number of smooth structures on 4-manifolds satisfying certain conditions, but they do not explicitly work out the circumstances under which two manifolds that arise from their construction will fail to be diffeomorphic on the grounds of Seiberg-Witten theory. This paper fills in that gap.
In this paper we describe braid equivalence for knots and links in a 3-manifold $M$ obtained by rational surgery along a framed link in $S^3$. We first prove a sharpened version of the Reidemeister theorem for links in $M$. We then give geometric formulations of the braid equivalence via mixed braids in $S^3$ using the $L$-moves and the braid band moves. We finally give algebraic formulations in terms of the mixed braid groups $B_{m,n}$ using cabling and the techniques of parting and combing for mixed braids. We also provide concrete formuli of the braid equivalence in the case where $M$ is a …
The twisted face-pairing construction of our earlier papers gives an efficient way of generating, mechanically and with little effort, myriads of relatively simple face-pairing descriptions of interesting closed 3-manifolds. The corresponding description in terms of surgery, or Dehn-filling, reveals the twist construction as a carefully organized surgery on a link. In this paper, we work out the relationship between the twisted face-pairing description of closed 3-manifolds and the more common descriptions by surgery and Heegaard diagrams. We show that all Heegaard diagrams have a natural deco…
A consequence of the Cabling Conjecture of Gonzalez-Acuña and Short is that Dehn surgery on a knot in $S^3$ cannot produce a manifold with more than two connected summands. In the event that some Dehn surgery produces a manifold with three or more connected summands, then the surgery parameter is bounded in terms of the bridge number by a result of Sayari. Here this bound is sharpened, providing further evidence in favour of the Cabling Conjecture.
