We determine the adjoint Reidemeister torsion of a $3$-manifold obtained by some Dehn surgery along K, where K is either the figure-eight knot or the $5_2$-knot. As in a vanishing conjecture (Benini et al. (2020, Journal of High Energy Physics 2020, 57), Gang et al. (2020, Journal of High Energy Physics 2020, 164), and Gang et al. (2021, Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics 25, 1819–1845)), we consider a similar conjecture and show that the conjecture holds for the 3-manifold.

Gay and Kirby introduced trisections, which describe any closed, oriented, smooth 4-manifold X as a union of three 4-dimensional handlebodies. A trisection is encoded in a diagram, namely three collections of curves in a closed oriented surface $\Sigma $ , guiding the gluing of the handlebodies. Any morphism $\varphi $ from $\pi _1(X)$ to a finitely generated free abelian group induces a morphism on $\pi _1(\Sigma )$ . We express the twisted homology and Reidemeister torsion of $(X;\varphi )$ in terms of the first homology of $(\Sigma ;\varphi )$ and the three subspaces generated by the collections of curves. We also express the intersection form of $(X;\varphi )$ in terms of the intersection form of $(\Sigma ;\varphi )$ .

We make some elementary observations concerning subcritically Stein fillable contact structures on 5-manifolds. Specifically, we determine the diffeomorphism type of such contact manifolds in the case where the fundamental group is finite cyclic, and we show that on the 5-sphere, the standard contact structure is the unique subcritically fillable one. More generally, it is shown that subcritically fillable contact structures on simply connected 5-manifolds are determined by their underlying almost contact structure. Along the way, we discuss the homotopy classification of almost contact structures.

We prove that the neighborhood complex $\text{N}\left( G \right)$, the box complex $\text{B}\left( G \right)$, the homomorphism complex $\text{Hom}\left( {{K}_{2}},\,G \right)$ and the Lovász complex $\text{L}\left( G \right)$ have the same simple ${{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}}$ -homotopy type in the sense of Whitehead. We show that these graph complexes are simple ${{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}}$ -universal.

We study the topological 4-dimensional surgery problem for a closed connected orientable topological 4-manifold $X$ with vanishing second homotopy and ${{\pi }_{1}}\left( X \right)\,\cong \,A\,*\,F\left( r \right)$ , where $A$ has one end and $F\left( r \right)$ is the free group of rank $r\,\ge \,1$. Our result is related to a theorem of Krushkal and Lee, and depends on the validity of the Novikov conjecture for such fundamental groups.

In this article, we give an explicit formula to compute the non abelian twisted sign-determined Reidemeister torsion of the exterior of a fibered knot in terms of its monodromy. As an application, we give explicit formulae for the non abelian Reidemeister torsion of torus knots and of the figure eight knot.

For a closed topological $n$-manifold $X$, the surgery exact sequence contains the set of manifold structures and the set of tangential structures of $X$. In the case of a compact topological $n$-manifold with boundary $(X$, $\partial X)$, the classical surgery theory usually considers two different types of structures. The first one concerns structures whose restrictions are fixed on the boundary. The second one uses two similar structures on the manifold pair. In his classical book, Wall mentioned the possibility of introducing a mixed type of structure on a manifold with boundary. Following this suggestion, we introduce mixed structures on a topological manifold with boundary, and describe their properties. Then we obtain connections between these structures and the classical ones, and prove that they fit in some surgery exact sequences. The relationships can be described by using certain braids of exact sequences. Finally, we discuss explicitly several geometric examples.

We show that the Seiberg-Witten invariants of a lens space determine and are determined by its Casson-Walker invariant and its Reidemeister-Turaev torsion.