Topology Seminar

A well-known strategy to disprove the smooth 4D Poincare conjecture is to find a knot that bounds a disk in a homotopy 4-ball but not in the standard 4-ball. Freedman, Gompf, Morrison and Walker suggested that Rasmussen's invariant from Khovanov homology could be useful for this purpose. I will describe three recent results about this strategy: that it fails for Gluck twists (joint work with Marengon, Sarkar and Willis); that an analogue works for other 4-manifolds (joint work with Marengon and Piccirillo); and that 0-surgery homeomorphisms provide a large class of potential examples (joint work with Piccirillo). In particular, I will show 21 algebraically slice knots such that if any of them were slice, then an exotic 4-sphere would exist. Speaker(s): Ciprian Manolescu (Stanford University)