Project description
Smooth four-manifolds: better characterisation via knots and their slice surfaces
Smooth four-manifolds – 4D topological manifolds with a smooth structure – are not well characterised. Funded by the European Research Council, the KnotSurf4d project aims to address this gap in the knowledge of higher dimensional manifolds by leveraging the genus function and its enhanced version that takes knots and their slice surfaces into account. This novel approach emphasising knots and their slice properties in various four-manifolds could ultimately provide a candidate for an invariant that is a smooth generalisation of the intersection form and that characterises smooth four-manifolds. The team will also study divisibility and torsion questions in the concordance group via knot Floer homology, as well as potential counterexamples for the famous Slice-Ribbon conjecture.
Objective
Four-dimensional smooth manifolds show very different behaviour than manifolds in any other dimension. In fact, in other dimensions we have a somewhat clear picture of the classification, while dimension four is still elusive. The project aims to further our knowledge in this question in several ways. The genus function, and its enhanced version taking knots and their slice surfaces into account, plays a crucial role in understanding different smooth structures on four-manifolds. Techniques for studying these objects range from topological and symplectic/algebraic geometric (on the constructive side) to algebraic and analytic methods resting on specific PDE’s and on counting their solutions (on the obstructive side).
The proposal aims to study several interrelated questions in this area. We plan to construct further exotic structures, detect and better understand their exoticness. In doing so, we put strong emphasis on knots and their slice properties in various four-manifolds. Ultimately we provide a candidate for an invariant, which is a smooth (and somewhat complicated) generalization of the intersection form, and we expect this generalization to characterize smooth four-manifolds. The novelty in this approach is the incorporation of knots and their slice surfaces in a significant and organized manner into the picture. While it provides a refined tool in general, this approach also touches classical aspects of four-manifold topology through the study of the concordance group. We plan to study divisibility and torsion questions in this group via knot Floer homology. Definition of the concordance group rests on the concept of slice knots, which is closely related to the ribbon construction. We plan to further study potential counterexamples for the famous Slice-Ribbon conjecture. The proposed problems can also provide explanations of the special behaviour of four-manifolds with definite intersection forms, like the four-sphere and the complex projective plane.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences mathematics pure mathematics topology algebraic topology
- natural sciences mathematics pure mathematics mathematical analysis differential equations partial differential equations
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2023-ADG
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1053 Budapest
Hungary
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