The concordance crosscap number and rational Witt span of a knot (Q2168226)

Any knot in the 3-sphere bounds nonorientable surfaces, and there are different ways of defining nonorientable genera. The simplest one is the crosscap number or nonorientable 3-genus \(\gamma_3(K )\) of a knot \(K\), which is the smallest first Betti number of any nonorientable surface \(\Sigma\) embedded in \(S^3\) with \(\partial \Sigma = K\). Then we have the 4-dimensional crosscap number or the nonorientable 4-genus \(\gamma_4(K )\), which is the smallest first Betti number of any nonorientable surface \(\Sigma\), smoothly and properly embedded into the 4-ball \(D^4\) and with \(\partial \Sigma = K\). There is one more, called the concordance crosscap number or the nonorientable concordance 3-genus of \(K\), \(\gamma_c(K)\), defined as \(\gamma_c(K ) = \min \{ \gamma_3(K') \, \vert \, K'\text{ is smoothly concordant to }K \}\). It can be shown that \(\gamma_c(K )\) takes values between the other two genera, in fact \(\gamma_4(K) \leq \gamma_c(K ) \leq \gamma_3(K)\). In the paper under review a new knot concordance invariant is defined, called the rational Witt span, or simply the Witt span of a knot, \(\mathrm{ws}(K)\). This is defined in an algebraic way by using the Witt ring of the rational numbers. The main result of the paper shows that \(\mathrm{ws}(K) \leq \gamma_c(K)\). This is used to calculate \(\gamma_c(K)\) for some knots. It is also shown that \(\mathrm{ws}(K)\) takes values in the set \(\{0,1,2,3 \}\). Then all knots with \(\mathrm{ws}(K)= 0\) or \(1\) are characterized. Some sufficient conditions are also given that ensure that \(\mathrm{ws}(K)\) is 2 or 3.