Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A link L in the 3-sphere is called chi-slice if it bounds a properly embedded surface F in the 4-ball with Euler characteristic 1. If L is a knot, then this definition coincides with the usual definition of sliceness. One feature of such a link L is that if the determinant of L is nonzero, then the double cover of the 3-sphere branched over L bounds a rational homology ball. In this talk, we will explore the chi-sliceness of 3-braid links. In particular, we will construct explicit families of chi-slice quasi-alternating 3-braids using band moves and we will obstruct the chi-sliceness of almost all other quasi-alternating 3-braid links by showing that their double branched covers do not bound rational homology 4-balls. This is a work in progress joint with Vitaly Brejevs.

Tutte paths have a critical role in the study of Hamiltonicity for 4-connected planar and other graph classes. We show quantitative Tutte path results in which we bound the number of bridges of the path. A corollary of this result is near optimal circumference bounds for essentially 4-connected planar and projective-planar graphs. Joint work with Xingxing Yu.