Concordance group and stable commutator length in braid groups

We define a quasihomomorphism from braid groups to the concordance group of knots and examine its properties and consequences of its existence. In particular, we provide a relation between the stable four ball genus in the concordance group and the stable commutator length in braid groups, and produce examples of infinite families of concordance classes of knots with uniformly bounded four ball genus. We also provide applications to the geometry of the infinite braid group. In particular, we show that its commutator subgroup admits a stably unbounded conjugation invariant norm. This answers an open problem posed by Burago, Ivanov and Polterovich.Comment: 25 pages, 5 figure

On Lipschitz functions on groups equipped with conjugation-invariant norms

We observe that a function on a group equipped with a bi-invariant word metric is Lipschitz if and only if it is a partial quasimorphism bounded on the generating set. We also show that an undistorted element is always detected by a homogeneous partial quasimorphisms. We provide a general homogenisation procedure for Lipschitz functions and relate partial quasimorphisms on a group to ones on its asymptotic cones.Comment: 11 page

Pseudoholomorphic tori in the Kodaira-Thurston manifold

The Kodaira-Thurston manifold is a quotient of a nilpotent Lie group by a cocompact lattice. We compute the family Gromov-Witten invariants which count pseudoholomorphic tori in the Kodaira-Thurston manifold. For a fixed symplectic form the Gromov-Witten invariant is trivial so we consider the twistor family of left-invariant symplectic forms which are orthogonal for some fixed metric on the Lie algebra. This family defines a loop in the space of symplectic forms. This is the first example of a genus one family Gromov-Witten computation for a non-K\"ahler manifold.Comment: 46 pages; v2 added some references and explanation, v3 couple of typos corrected. To appear in Compositio Mathematic

Directional asymptotic cones of groups equipped with bi-invariant metrics

68 pagesPreprin

Cancelation norm and the geometry of biinvariant word metrics

We study biinvariant word metrics on groups. We provide an efficient algorithm for computing the biinvariant word norm on a finitely generated free group and we construct an isometric embedding of a locally compact tree into the biinvariant Cayley graph of a nonabelian free group. We investigate the geometry of cyclic subgroups. We observe that in many classes of groups cyclic subgroups are either bounded or detected by homogeneous quasimorphisms. We call this property the bq-dichotomy and we prove it for many classes of groups of geometric origin.Comment: 32 pages, to appear in Glasgow Journal of Mathematic

Hedging of European type contingent claims in discrete time binomial market models

Preprin