papers

Publications (25)

math.GT2021

The relative Whitney trick and its applications

Christopher William Davis, Patrick Orson, JungHwan Park

We introduce a geometric operation, which we call the relative Whitney trick, that removes a single double point between properly immersed surfaces in a -manifold with boundary.…

math.GT2018

Smooth and topological almost concordance

Matthias Nagel, Patrick Orson, JungHwan Park +1

We investigate the disparity between smooth and topological almost concordance of knots in general 3-manifolds Y. Almost concordance is defined by considering knots in Y modulo con…

math.GT2017

Satellites and concordance of knots in 3-manifolds

Stefan Friedl, Matthias Nagel, Patrick Orson +1

Given a 3-manifold and a free homotopy class in , we investigate the set of topological concordance classes of knots in representing the given homotop…

math.GT2025

Smoothing topological pseudo-isotopies of 4-manifolds

Patrick Orson, Mark Powell, Oscar Randal-Williams

Given a closed, smooth 4-manifold and self-diffeomorphism that is topologically pseudo-isotopic to the identity, we study the question of whether is moreover smoothly p…

math.GT2024

Locally flat simple spheres in

Anthony Conway, Patrick Orson

The fundamental group of the complement of a locally flat surface in a -manifold is called the knot group of the surface. In this article we prove that two locally flat -sphe…

math.GT2024

Unknotting nonorientable surfaces

Anthony Conway, Patrick Orson, Mark Powell

Given a nonorientable, locally flatly embedded surface in the -sphere of nonorientable genus , Massey showed that the normal Euler number lies in $\lbrace -2h,-2h+4,\ldots,2h…

math.GT2021

Abelian invariants of doubly slice links

Anthony Conway, Patrick Orson

We provide obstructions to a link in arising as the cross section of any number of unlinked spheres in . Our obstructions arise from the multivariable signature, the Bla…

math.GT2024

Simple spines of homotopy 2-spheres are unique

Patrick Orson, Mark Powell

A locally flatly embedded -sphere in a compact -manifold is called a spine if the inclusion map is a homotopy equivalence. A spine is called simple if the complement of t…

math.GT2016

Double -groups and doubly-slice knots

Patrick Orson

We develop a theory of chain complex double-cobordism for chain complexes equipped with Poincaré duality. The resulting double-cobordism groups are a refinement of Ranicki's torsi…

math.GT2015

Double Witt groups

Patrick Orson

The difference between slice and doubly-slice knots is reflected in algebra by the difference between metabolic and hyperbolic Blanchfield linking forms. We exploit this algebraic…

math.GT2017

Khovanov homotopy calculations using flow category calculus

Andrew Lobb, Patrick Orson, Dirk Schuetz

The Lipshitz-Sarkar stable homotopy link invariant defines Steenrod squares on the Khovanov cohomology of a link. Lipshitz-Sarkar constructed an algorithm for computing the first t…

math.GT2022

A calculus for flow categories

Andrew Lobb, Patrick Orson, Dirk Schuetz

We describe a calculus of moves for modifying a framed flow category without changing the associated stable homotopy type. We use this calculus to show that if two framed flow cate…

math.GT2016

A Khovanov stable homotopy type for colored links

Andrew Lobb, Patrick Orson, Dirk Schuetz

We extend Lipshitz-Sarkar's definition of a stable homotopy type associated to a link L whose cohomology recovers the Khovanov cohomology of L. Given an assignment c (called a colo…

math.GT2019

Null, recursively starlike-equivalent decompositions shrink

Jeffrey Meier, Patrick Orson, Arunima Ray

A subset of a metric space is said to be starlike-equivalent if it has a neighbourhood which is mapped homeomorphically into for some , sending to a s…

math.GT2020

A lower bound for the doubly slice genus from signatures

Patrick Orson, Mark Powell

The doubly slice genus of a knot in the 3-sphere is the minimal genus among unknotted orientable surfaces in the 4-sphere for which the knot arises as a cross-section. We use the c…

math.GT2015

Double L-theory

Patrick Orson

We develop new algebraic methods refining the Witt group of linking forms and Ranicki's torsion algebraic L-groups into double Witt groups and double L-groups. At each prime ideal…

math.GT2017

Triple linking numbers and surface systems

Christopher William Davis, Matthias Nagel, Patrick Orson +1

We give a refined value group for the collection of triple linking numbers of links in the 3-sphere. Given two links with the same pairwise linking numbers we show that they have t…

math.GT2020

Embedding spheres in knot traces

Peter Feller, Allison N. Miller, Matthias Nagel +3

The trace of -framed surgery on a knot in is a 4-manifold homotopy equivalent to the 2-sphere. We characterise when a generator of the second homotopy group of such a mani…

math.GT2016

Framed cobordism and flow category moves

Andrew Lobb, Patrick Orson, Dirk Schuetz

Framed flow categories were introduced by Cohen-Jones-Segal as a way of encoding the flow data associated to a Floer functional. A framed flow category gives rise to a CW-complex w…

math.GT2025

Simply slicing knots

Anthony Conway, Patrick Orson, Mark Pencovitch

Given a simply-connected 4-manifold with boundary the 3-sphere, this paper establishes sufficient conditions for a knot in the boundary to be sliced by a locally flat disc in the 4…

math.GT2019

Doubly slice knots and metabelian obstructions

Patrick Orson, Mark Powell

For , we develop -signature obstructions for -dimensional knots with metabelian knot groups to be doubly slice. For each , we construct an infi…

math.GT2026

Smooth stable isotopy of topologically isotopic surfaces

Daniel Galvin, Patrick Orson, Mark Powell

A stabilisation of a -manifold is the connected sum of with some number of copies of . If two smooth surfaces in a -manifold are topologically isotopic…

math.GT2014

Twist spinning of knots and metabolizers of Blanchfield pairings

Stefan Friedl, Patrick Orson

In a classic paper Zeeman introduced the k-twist spin of a knot K and showed that the exterior of a twist spin fibers over S^1. In particular this result shows that the knot K # -K…

math.GT2024

A survey of the foundations of four-manifold theory in the topological category

Stefan Friedl, Matthias Nagel, Patrick Orson +1

This survey aims to provide a guide to the literature on topological 4-manifolds. Foundational theorems on 4-manifolds are stated, especially in the topological category. Precise r…

math.GT2024

Mapping class groups of simply connected 4-manifolds with boundary

Patrick Orson, Mark Powell

We compute the topological mapping class group of every compact, simply connected, topological 4-manifold. This was previously only known in the closed case. If the 4-manifold is s…