Unknotting immersed surface-links and singular 2-dimensional braids by 1-handle surgeries (Q1282247)

A surface-link is an immersed closed orientable surface in \(\mathbb{R}^4\) which is not necessarily connected and whose singularities are transverse double points. An embedded surface-link is unknotted if it equals the boundary of some set of pairwise disjoint handlebodies and 3-balls. A general surface-link is unknotted if it is obtained from an embedded unknotted surface-link by adding some trivial self-intersections. There is a notion of surgery along 1-handles; we attach a 3-ball \(B\) to a surface-link \(F\) which intersects \(B\) in two 2-discs in the boundary of \(B\) avoiding the singularities of \(F\). It is known that it is possible to transform each embedded surface-link into an unknotted one by a sequence of surgeries along 1-handles. The main result of the paper under review extends this theorem to immersed surface-links. The proof of this result uses the concept of a 2-dimensional braid. You may think on an usual 1-dimensional braid \(\alpha\) as an embedding of \(X_n\times [0,1]\) into \(D \times [0,1]\) where \(D\) is a 2-disc and \(X_n\) is a subset of the interior of \(D\) with exactly \(n\) points. Here \([0,1]\) acts as the \(z\)-axis and \(\alpha\) intersects each horizontal disc \(D\times \{t\}\) in \(n\) points. Similarly, a 2-dimensional braid \(\alpha\) is an embedded surface in \(D_1\times D_2\) satisfying some conditions, where \(D_1\) and \(D_2\) are 2-discs. For example, it is required that \(\text{pr}_2: \alpha \subseteq D_1\times D_2\to D_2\) is an \(n\)-fold covering. If \(\alpha\) is an immersed surface, we get the notion of a singular 2-dimensional braid. The closure of a singular 2-dimensional braid is a surface-link and the author proved that each surface-link is obtained in this way. The author proves that the closure of a 2-dimensional singular braid is unknotted if and only if the braid is unknotted; this reduces the main theorem to a problem about braids. In order to prove the result about braids, the author uses a so-called chart-description of a singular 2-dimensional braid. Such a chart is some kind of graph in the interior of a 2-disc. This yields a 2-dimensional description of a braid, and by earlier results of the author, the equivalence of braids corresponds to some set of elementary transformations on their chart-descriptions. Moreover, the concept of surgery along 1-handles can be translated into the language of chart-descriptions. Finally, the transformation of an arbitrary chart-description into an unknotted one is achieved by an explicit algorithm. This procedure yields an upper bound on the number of surgeries needed to unknot a surface-link.