arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Daniel Galvin.
We survey computations and tools concerning the mapping class group of a compact, oriented, connected 3-manifold $M$. We provide a guide to the literature and sketch proofs for various families of irreducible and geometric 3-manifolds. We also consider JSJ and prime decompositions of 3-manifolds, and consequences for their mapping class groups.
A stabilisation of a $4$-manifold $X$ is the connected sum of $X$ with some number of copies of $S^2\times S^2$. If two smooth surfaces in a $4$-manifold are topologically isotopic, we investigate whether they must moreover be smoothly isotopic in some stabilisation of $X$. We prove this result holds whenever the surfaces are trivial in the $\mathbb{Z}/2$-homology of $X$. We also produce a large class of fundamental groups of the ambient $4$-manifold for which the result holds; this class includes free products of classical knot groups and, in particular, free groups.
We construct examples of non-smoothable surfaces in the $4$-sphere, thereby answering Question 4.32 on the K3 problem list. These surfaces are non-orientable and have knot group of order $2$, thus simultaneously answering Question 4.29(a) on the K3 problem list.
We consider the realisation problem for normal 1-types of 4-manifolds with a given boundary. More precisely, given a normal 1-type $\xi$ and closed 3-dimensional $\xi$-manifold $Y$, does there exist a compact 4-dimensional $\xi$-manifold with boundary $Y$? We describe a three stage obstruction theory for the existence of such a 4-manifold, with our main contribution being a `tertiary' obstruction that we describe geometrically via Wall's quadratic self-intersection form.
We define obstructions which obstruct topological pseudo-isotopies from being isotopic to isotopies in dimension four. These match the smooth obstructions of Hatcher-Wagoner for smooth pseudo-isotopies, and accordingly are valued in certain Whitehead groups. We show that our obstructions are fully realisable, and we use these realisations to build homeomorphisms of $Y\times S^1$ for many 3-manifolds $Y$ that are pseudo-isotopic to the identity but not isotopic to the identity.
We show that there exists an algorithm that takes as input two closed, simply connected, topological 4-manifolds and decides whether or not these 4-manifolds are homeomorphic. In particular, we explain in detail how closed, simply connected, topological 4-manifolds can be naturally represented by a Kirby diagram consisting only of 2-handles. This representation is used as input for our algorithm. Along the way, we develop an algorithm to compute the Kirby-Siebenmann invariant of a closed, simply connected, topological 4-manifold from any of its Kirby diagrams and describe an algorithm that decides whether or not two intersection forms are isometric. In a slightly different direction, we discuss the decidability of the stable classification of smooth manifolds with more general fundamental groups. Here we show that there exists an algorithm that takes as input two closed, oriented, smooth 4-manifolds with fundamental groups isomorphic to a finite group with cyclic Sylow 2-subgroup, an infinite cyclic group, or a group of geometric dimension at most 3 (in the latter case we additionally assume that the universal covers of both 4-manifolds are not spin), and decides whether or not these two 4-manifolds are orientation-preserving stably diffeomorphic.
We construct the first examples of non-smoothable self-homeomorphisms of smooth $4$-manifolds with boundary that fix the boundary and act trivially on homology. As a corollary, we construct self-diffeomorphisms of $4$-manifolds with boundary that fix the boundary and act trivially on homology but cannot be isotoped to any self-diffeomorphism supported in a collar of the boundary and, in particular, are not isotopic to any generalised Dehn twist.