Thursday, 14 January 2010

gt.geometric topology - A problem/conjecture related to 4-manifolds that deserves a name. What name does it deserve?

There's an old problem in 4-manifold theory that, as far as I know, doesn't have a name associated with it and really deserves a name.



Let $M$ be a smooth 4-manifold with boundary. Let $S$ be a smoothly embedded 2-dimensional sphere in $partial M$. Assume $S$ does not bound a ball in $partial M$, but $S$ is null-homotopic in $M$. Does $S$ bound a smooth 3-ball in $M$? Perhaps you need to replace $S$ by another non-trivial $S'$ in $partial M$ before you can find a 3-ball in $M$ bounding it?



You could think of this as the co-dimension one analogue to Dehn's lemma for 4-manifolds. Usually when people talk about a Dehn lemma for 4-manifolds they're interested in the co-dimension 2 analogue.



Does this problem / conjecture have a name? If not, do you have a good name for it? Do you know of anywhere in the literature where this issue is investigated?



Off the top of my head the only vaguely related things I know about in the literature is a 1975 paper of Swarup's.

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