We show that any 4-manifold admitting a $(g;k_1,k_2,0)$-trisection is an irregular 3-fold cover of the 4-sphere whose branching set is a surface in $S^4$, smoothly embedded except for one singular point which is the cone on a link. A 4-manifold admits such a trisection if and only if it has a handle decomposition with no 1-handles; it is conjectured that all simply-connected 4-manifolds have this property.
By using double branched covers, we prove that there is a 1-1 correspondence between the set of knotoids in the 2-sphere, up to orientation reversion and rotation, and knots with a strong inversion, up to conjugacy. This correspondence allows us to study knotoids through tools and invariants coming from knot theory. In particular, concepts from geometrisation generalise to knotoids, allowing us to characterise invertibility and other properties in the hyperbolic case. Moreover, with our construction we are able to detect both the trivial knotoid in the 2-sphere and the trivial planar knotoid.
In this paper we provide a negative answer to a question of Farb about the relation between the algebraic degree of the stretch factor of a pseudo-Anosov homeomorphism and the genus of the surface on which it is defined.
Given a double cover between 3-manifolds branched along a nullhomologous link, we establish an inequality between the dimensions of their Heegaard Floer homologies. We discuss the relationship with the L-space conjecture and give some other topological applications, as well as an analogous result for sutured Floer homology.
We study simple branched coverings of degree d of the 2- and 3- dimensional sphere branched over oriented links. We demonstrate how to use braid charts to develop embeddings of these into $S^k times D^2$ for $k=2,3 when $d=2,3$. This is an initial part of our study and represents the manuscript submitted to the RIMS workshop at Intelligence of Low Dimensional Topology.
Branched covers are applied frequently in topology - most prominently in the construction of closed oriented PL d-manifolds. In particular, strong bounds for the number of sheets and the topology of the branching set are known for dimension d<=4. On the other hand, Izmestiev and Joswig described how to obtain a simplicial covering space (the partial unfolding) of a given simplicial complex, thus obtaining a simplicial branched cover [Adv. Geom. 3(2):191-255, 2003]. We present a large class of branched covers which can be constructed via the partial unfolding. In particular, for d<=4 every closed oriented PL d-manifold is the partial unfolding of some polytopal d-sphere.