Concordance of Seifert surfaces (Q1741440)

The article under review introduces and studies the notion of concordance of Seifert surfaces. \par Two Seifert surfaces $F$ and $F'$ are said to be concordant if there exists an embedding of $F\times [0,1]$ into ${S}^3 \times [0,1]$ so that the image intersected with ${S}^3 \times \{0\}$ is $F\times \{0\}$, the image intersected with ${S}^3 \times \{1\}$ is $F'\times \{1\}$ and all the orientations match. If $F$ and $F'$ are concordant, then clearly so are the boundary knots $K$ and $K'$. While concordance of knots does not imply S-equivalence, it is shown that concordance of Seifert surfaces does. However, an example is presented showing that knot Floer homology need not be invariant under Seifert surface concordance. \par The main result of the article under review states that any Seifert surface of a nontrivial knot $K$ is concordant to a Seifert surface of a knot $K'$ with hyperbolic complement of arbitrarily large volume, with exterior of arbitrarily large Haken number, and admitting a map of pairs $f:({S}^3,K')\to({S}^3,K)$ inducing an epimorphism of the fundamental groups of the complements. This recovers and unifies previous results due to Myers (for concordance), Kawauchi and Friedl (for S-equivalence), and Kawauchi and Silver-Whitten (on epimorphisms between fundamental groups). \par The proof uses an explicit glueing construction: a suitably chosen hyperbolic tangle and its mirror are inserted into regions of a standard position for Seifert surfaces. This allows both an explicit description of a concordance that has the same effect, and a proof of hyperbolicity. In order to increase the Haken number arbitrarily, the tangles are iterated. An arbitrarily large Haken number in turn implies arbitrarily large hyperbolic volume, as is shown in the Appendix. In the construction of the maps $f$, the specific form of so-called boundary tangles is used. \par The presentation of the article is very clear, and explicit constructions and tangles are provided ``ready for use''.