Distinguishing slice disks using knot Floer homology (Q2286219)

A knot \(K\) is \textit{slice} if it bounds a smoothly embedded disc \(D \subset D^4\). The paper under review studies the slice discs that a given knot \(K\) can bound, up to diffeomorphism, isotopy, stable diffeomorphism and stable isotopy. Here, the authors call two slice discs \(D,D'\) for a knot \(K\) \textit{diffeomorphic} if there is an orientation preserving diffeomorphism of \(D^4\) that takes \(D\) to \(D'\), \textit{isotopic} if they are ambient isotopic rel. boundary, and \textit{stably diffeomorphic} (resp. \textit{stably isotopic}) if they become diffeomorphic (resp. isotopic) after taking the connected sum of \(D\) and \(D'\) with collections of 2-knots. In Section 3, the authors discuss the construction of slice discs via \textit{deform spinning}. In the latter sections, they use knot Floer homology to study these discs up to stable isotopy and stable diffeomorphism. Given a knot \(K\) and a diffeomorphism \(d \colon (S^3,K) \to (S^3,K)\) which is the identity on a small ball that intersects \(K\) in an unknotted arc, \textit{deform spinning} produces a slice disc \(D_{K,d} \subset D^4\) for \(K \# -K\). Deform spinning originates in \textit{R. A. Litherland}'s construction of deform spun 2-knots, see [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 250, 311--331 (1979; Zbl 0413.57015)]. The authors prove that any pair \(D_{K,d},D_{K,d'}\) of deform spun slice discs are diffeomorphic (Proposition 3.2), while two deform spun slice discs \(D_{K,d}\) and \(D_{K,d'}\) are isotopic if and only if \(d,d'\) are isotopic diffeomorphisms (Proposition 3.10). The authors then focus on a particular class of deform spun slice discs known as \(n\)\textit{-roll-spun slice discs}; these are slice discs \(D_{K,r^n}\) for \(K \# -K\) with \(n \in \mathbb{Z}\). Under some mild assumptions on a knot \(K\), Theorem 5.4 uses knot Floer homology to distinguish all \(D_{K,r^n}\) for \(n \in \mathbb{Z}\) up to stable isotopy. The invariant \(t_{D,P}\) used to prove this theorem originates in work of \textit{A. Juhász} and \textit{M. Marengon} [Geom. Topol. 20, No. 6, 3623-3673 (2016; Zbl 1364.57013)]. Prior to this work, there had been no computation of \(t_{D,P}\), but Theorem 5.1 shows that for deform spun knots, \(t_{D_{K,d},P}\) can be computed in terms of the map induced by \(d\) on the hat flavor of knot Floer homology. Finally, Section 6 studies an invariant \(\operatorname{rk}(D)\) extracted from \(t_{D,P}\) and known as the \textit{rank}.