Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Symmetric unions are an interesting class of knots. Although they have not been studied much for their own sake, they frequently appear in the literature. One such instance regards the question of whether there is a nontrivial knot with trivial Jones polynomial. In my talk, I will describe a class of symmetric unions, constructed by Tanaka, such that if any are amphichiral, they would have trivial Jones polynomial. Then I will show how such a knot not only answers the above question but also gives rise to a counterexample to the Cosmetic Surgery Conjecture. However, I will prove that such a knot is in fact trivial and hence cannot be used to answer any of these questions. Finally, I will discuss how the arguments that go into this proof can be generalized to study amphichiral symmetric unions.

Links of singularity and generalized algebraic links are ways of constructing three-manifolds and smooth links inside them from algebraic surfaces and curves inside them. Némethi created lattice homology as an invariant for links of normal surface singularities which developed out of computations for Heegaard Floer homology. Later Ozsváth, Stipsicz, and Szabó defined knot lattice homology for generalized algebraic knots in rational homology spheres, which is known to play a similar role to knot Floer homology and is known to compute knot Floer in some cases. I discuss a proof that knot lattice is an invariant of the smooth knot type, which had been previously suspected but not confirmed.

Artin groups are a generalization of braid groups, first defined by Tits in the 1960s. While specific types of Artin groups have many of the same properties as braid groups, other examples of Artin groups are still very mysterious. Braid groups are can be thought of as the mapping class groups of a punctured disc. The combinatorial and geometric structure of the mapping class group is reflected in a Gromov-hyperbolic space called the curve graph of the mapping class group. Using the curve graph of the mapping class group of a punctured disc, we can define a graph associated to a given braid group. In this talk, I will discuss how to generalize this construction to more general classes of Artin groups. I will also discuss the current known properties of this graph and further open questions about what properties of the curve graph carry over to this new graph. 

A 3-manifold is called an L-space if its Heegaard Floer homology is "simple." No characterization of all such "simple" 3-manifolds is known. Manifolds obtained as the double-branched cover of alternating knots in the 3-sphere give examples of L-spaces. In this talk, I'll discuss the search for L-spaces among higher index branched cyclic covers of knots. In particular, I'll give new examples of knots whose branched cyclic covers are L-spaces for every index n. I will also discuss an application to "visibility" of certain periodic symmetries of a knot. Some of this work is joint with Ahmad Issa.