Bridge trisections and classical knotted surface theory (Q2093210)

A bridge trisection of a closed surface \(S\) in \(S^4\) is a decomposition \((S^4,S)=(X_1, \mathcal{D}_1) \cup (X_2, \mathcal{D}_2) \cup (X_3, \mathcal{D}_3)\), where each \(X_i\) is a 4-ball, and each \(\mathcal{D}_i=X_i \cap S\) is a collection of several boundary-parallel disks in \(X_i\), and satisfying some other conditions. A bridge trisection of a surface is determined, up to isotopy, from a triple of trivial tangle diagrams \(\mathbb{D}=(\mathbb{D}_1, \mathbb{D}_2, \mathbb{D}_3)\) such that \(\mathbb{D}_i \cup \overline{\mathbb{D}}_{i+1}\) is a planar diagram for an unlink, called a tri-plane diagram. \newline In this paper, the authors connect the theory of bridge trisections with that of knotted surface theory. The main results are as follows. The authors describe how to obtain a broken surface diagram for a surface \(S\) from a tri-plane diagram for \(S\), and as a corollary, they compute the normal Euler number \(e(S)\) from a tri-plane diagram. Further, they give a new proof of the Whitney-Massey theorem: for a connected nonorientable closed surface \(S\) in \(S^4\), \(e(S) \in \{ 2 \chi-4, 2 \chi, 2\chi+4, \ldots, -2\chi+4\}\), where \(\chi\) is the Euler characteristic of \(S\). They describe how to calculate the fundamental group of \(S^4\backslash S\), from a tri-plane diagram. They construct a bridge trisection from a given ribbon presentation of a ribbon surface, and by investigating the Nielsen invariant, they show that there exist infinitely many ribbon 2-knots that are nonisotopic as bridge trisections.