Weakly minimal area of cubical 2-knots on \(\mathbb{R}^4\) (Q2315316)

The canonical hypercubic honeycomb or canonical cubulation \(\mathcal{C}\) of \(\mathbb{R}^4\) is its decomposition into hypercubes which are the images of the unit hypercube by translations by vectors with integer coefficients. The canonical scaffolding \(\mathcal{S}^2\) of \(\mathbb{R}^4\) is the union of all cubes of dimension 2 contained in the faces of the 4-cubes in \(\mathcal{C}\). A 2-dimensional knot in \(\mathbb{R}^4\) is a 2-dimensional sphere embedded in \(\mathbb{R}^4\). A 2-dimensional knot in \(\mathbb{R}^4\) is called a cubical 2-knot if it is contained in the canonical scaffolding \(\mathcal{S}^2\). A cubical 2-knot \(K\) is the union of \(m(K)\) unit squares for a positive integer \(m(K)\), which is called the area of \(K\). It is known due to \textit{J. P. Díaz} et al. [J. Knot Theory Ramifications 28, No. 1, Article ID 1950008, 21 p. (2019; Zbl 1409.57026)] that two cubical 2-knots in \(\mathbb{R}^4\) are isotopic if and only if they are related by a finite sequence of moves called cubical moves. A cubical 2-knot \(K\) is called minimal or weakly minimal if the area of \(K\) is not reduced by any sequence of cubical moves or any single cubical move, respectively. In this paper, the authors focus on weakly minimal cubical 2-knots. The main result is that there exists a weakly minimal cubical 2-knot with area 256 representing the spun trefoil knot. The authors construct the cubical spun trefoil knot step by step, by using the fact that the length, that is, the minimal number of edges, of the cubical trefoil knot in \(\mathbb{R}^3\) is 24. The part that the constructed cubical 2-knot is weakly minimal is shown by investigating all possible cases.