This is a collection of notes on embedding problems for 3-manifolds. The main question explored is `which 3-manifolds embed smoothly in the 4-sphere? The terrain of exploration is the Burton/Martelli/Matveev/Petronio census of triangulated prime closed 3-manifolds built from 11 or less tetrahedra. There are 13766 manifolds in the census, of which 13400 are orientable. Of the 13400 orientable manifolds, only 149 of them have hyperbolic torsion linking forms and are thus candidates for embedability in the 4-sphere. The majority of this paper is devoted to the embedding problem for these 149 manifolds. At present 41 are known to embed. Among the remaining manifolds, embeddings into homotopy 4-spheres are constructed for 4. 67 manifolds are known to not embed in the 4-sphere. This leaves 37 unresolved cases, of which only 3 are geometric manifolds i.e. having a trivial JSJ-decomposition.
We produce a rational homology 3-sphere that does not smoothly bound either a positive or negative definite 4-manifold. Such a 3-manifold necessarily cannot be rational homology cobordant to a Seifert fibered space or any 3-manifold obtained by Dehn surgery on a knot. The proof requires an analysis of short characteristic covectors in bimodular lattices.
In this paper, we prove that any closed orientable 3-manifold $M$ other than $#^k S^1times S^2$ and $S^3$ satisfies the following properties: (1) For any compact orientable 4-manifold $N$ bounded by $M$, the inclusion does not induce an isomorphism on their fundamental groups $pi_1$. (2) For any map $f:Mto N$ from $M$ to a closed orientable 4-manifold $N$, $f$ does not induce an isomorphism on $pi_1$. Relevant results on higher dimensional manifolds are also obtained.
This paper uses work of Haettel to classify all subgroups of PGL(4,R) isomorphic to (R^3 , +), up to conjugacy. We use this to show there are 4 families of generalized cusps up to projective equivalence in dimension 3.
We construct a functor from the smooth 4-dimensional manifolds to the hyper-algebraic number fields, i.e. fields with non-commutative multiplication. It is proved that that the simply connected 4-manifolds correspond to the abelian extensions. We recover the Rokhlin and Donaldsons Theorems from the Galois theory of the non-commutative fields.