Hopf bands in arborescent Hopf plumbings (Q2002604)

A Hopf band is an unknotted annulus with a positive or negative full twist. For a finite tree in the plane, a surface \(S\) with boundary \(K\) is constructed by taking a positive Hopf band for every vertex and joining the corresponding Hopf bands for every adjacency by a band in the plane. Such a surface \(S\) can serve as a Seifert surface of the bounding link \(K\) and as a fiber for an open book construction around \(K\), and is called a positive arborescent Hopf plumbing. The present work appoaches the study of \(\mathcal{C}_n(S)\) of isotopy classes of \(n\)-framed unknotted oriented curves in \(S\) where \(n\) is a fixed integer. The monodromy of the open book provides an action on \(C_n(S)\), the image of positive Hopf bands in \(H_1(S;\mathbb{Z})\). Finite trees are spherical, affine, or hyperbolic, resp., according to the theory of Coxeter groups. Looking at the case \(n=1\), the main theorem states that, for a positive arborescent Hopf plumbed surface \(S\), the set \(C_1(S)\) of homology classes of Hopf bands is finite if and only if the basic tree is spherical, whereas, for a hyperbolic tree giving rise to a knot, \(C_1(S)\) consists of infinitely many orbits of the monodromy. For an affine tree, \(C_1(S)\) is generally infinite. The arguments rest upon investigating the relevance of the quadratic form of the respective Coxeter-Dynkin tree, e.g., that the quadratic form takes on the value \(1\) on a class induced by a Hopf band.