Pulling apart 2-spheres in 4-manifolds

MaRDI QIDQ462623zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Rob Schneiderman, Peter Teichner

Publication date 21 October 2014

Published in Documenta Mathematica (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.5534, http://www.emis.de/journals/DMJDMV/vol-19/31.html

IPFS File on IPFS (Hint: this is only the Hash - if you get a timeout, this file is not available on our server.)

zbMATH Keywords

4-manifolddisjoint immersionsurfaceWhitney towers.

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

General low-dimensional topology (57M99) Embeddings and immersions in topological manifolds (57N35) Embeddings in differential topology (57R40)

Abstract: An obstruction theory for representing homotopy classes of surfaces in 4-manifolds by immersions with pairwise disjoint images is developed, using the theory of non-repeating Whitney towers. The accompanying higher-order intersection invariants provide a geometric generalization of Milnor's link-homotopy invariants, and can give the complete obstruction to pulling apart 2-spheres in certain families of 4-manifolds. It is also shown that in an arbitrary simply connected 4-manifold any number of parallel copies of an immersed surface with vanishing self-intersection number can be pulled apart, and that this is not always possible in the non-simply connected setting. The order 1 intersection invariant is shown to be the complete obstruction to pulling apart 2-spheres in any 4-manifold after taking connected sums with finitely many copies of S^2 imes S^2; and the order 2 intersection indeterminacies for quadruples of immersed 2-spheres in a simply connected 4-manifold are shown to lead to interesting number theoretic questions.

Review text

Let \(\Sigma=\coprod_{i}\Sigma_{i}\) be a surface decomposed into connected components, let \(V\) be a \(4\)-dimensional manifold and let \(f: \Sigma \rightarrow V\) be a map. The paper under review concerns the question of whether the map \(f\) is homotopic to a map \(g: \Sigma \rightarrow V\) such that the \(g(\Sigma_{i})\) are pairwise disjoint subsets of \(V\) (in this case we say that \(f\) can be pulled apart). This question which arises as a precursor to the problem of whether or not \(f\) is homotopic to an embedding, which also arises in the study of homotopy groups configuration spaces, has been studied in many particular cases (see [\textit{C. T. C. Wall}, Surgery on compact manifolds. 2nd ed. Providence, RI: AMS (1999; Zbl 0935.57003)]; [\textit{K. Kobayashi}, in: Math. Semin. Notes, Kobe Univ. 5, No. 1, 109--116 (1977; Zbl 0361.57015)]; [\textit{R. Schneiderman} and \textit{P. Teichner}, Geom. Topol. Monogr. 7, 101--134 (2004; Zbl 1090.57013)]).NEWLINENEWLINEIn this paper, the authors extend the work in [Zbl 1090.57013] to a surface which is a disjoint union of an arbitrary number of \(2\)-spheres. For this, they use a variation of the theory of Whitney towers as developed in [\textit{J. Conant} et al., Geom. Topol. 16, No. 3, 1419--1479 (2012; Zbl 1257.57005)].

Recommendations

• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 4107750
• The group of disjoint 2-spheres in 4-space
• Smooth embeddings of 2-spheres in 4-manifolds
• Homotopy invariance of 4-manifold decompositions: connected sums
• Robust four-manifolds and robust embeddings

Cited in

(8)

• Higher order intersection numbers of \(2\)-spheres in \(4\)-manifolds
• The relative Whitney trick and its applications
• Introduction to Whitney towers
• The group of disjoint 2-spheres in 4-space
• On invariants of link maps in dimension four
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 2227016 (Why is no real title available?)
• Embedding calculus and grope cobordism of knots
• Clasper concordance, Whitney towers and repeating Milnor invariants

This page was built for publication: Pulling apart 2-spheres in 4-manifolds

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q462623)