No Arabic abstract
We give simple homological conditions for a rational homology 3-sphere Y to have infinite order in the rational homology cobordism group, and for a collection of rational homology spheres to be linearly independent. These translate immediately to statements about knot concordance when Y is the branched double cover of a knot, recovering some results of Livingston and Naik. The statements depend only on the homology groups of the 3-manifolds, but are proven through an analysis of correction terms and their behavior under connected sums.
For each integral homology sphere $Y$, a function $Gamma_Y$ on the set of integers is constructed. It is established that $Gamma_Y$ depends only on the homology cobordism of $Y$ and it recovers the Fr{o}yshov invariant. A relation between $Gamma_Y$ and Fintushel-Sterns $R$-invariant is stated. It is shown that the value of $Gamma_Y$ at each integer is related to the critical values of the Chern-Simons functional. Some topological applications of $Gamma_Y$ are given. In particular, it is shown that if $Gamma_Y$ is trivial, then there is no simply connected homology cobordism from $Y$ to itself.
The study of triangulations on manifolds is closely related to understanding the three-dimensional homology cobordism group. We review here what is known about this group, with an emphasis on the local equivalence methods coming from Pin(2)- equivariant Seiberg-Witten Floer spectra and involutive Heegaard Floer homology.
In this paper we define and investigate Z/2-homology cobordism invariants of Z/2-homology 3-spheres which turn out to be related to classical invariants of knots. As an application we show that many lens spaces have infinite order in the Z/2-homology cobordism group and we prove a lower bound for the slice genus of a knot on which integral surgery yields a given Z/2-homology sphere. We also give some new examples of 3-manifolds which cannot be obtained by integral surgery on a knot.
Let $Gamma$ be a finite-index subgroup of the mapping class group of a closed genus $g$ surface that contains the Torelli group. For instance, $Gamma$ can be the level $L$ subgroup or the spin mapping class group. We show that $H_2(Gamma;Q) cong Q$ for $g geq 5$. A corollary of this is that the rational Picard groups of the associated finite covers of the moduli space of curves are equal to $Q$. We also prove analogous results for surface with punctures and boundary components.
We develop a theory of equivariant group presentations and relate them to the second homology group of a group. Our main application says that the second homology group of the Torelli subgroup of the mapping class group is finitely generated as an $Sp(2g,mathbb{Z})$-module.