Surgery

In the process of attaching a -handle to a manifold , the boundary of  is modified by a process called -surgery. Surgery consists of the removal of a tubular neighborhood of a -sphere  from the boundaries of  and the  standard sphere, and the gluing together of these two scarred-up objects along their common boundaries.

REFERENCES:

Cappell, S.; Ranicki, A.; and Rosenberg, J. (Eds.). Surveys on Surgery Theory, Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.