Knot concordances and alternating knots (Q2363559)

This paper contains several results demonstrating that the knot concordance group \(\mathcal{C}\) is much larger than the subgroup generated by alternating knots, in both the smooth and topological categories. The authors describe a variety of invariants, derived from the Tristram-Levine signature function and Heegaard Floer knot homology, that they use to bound the minimal genus of a cobordism to an alternating knot. Their main result is that for any \(N>0\) there is an infinite rank free subgroup of the concordance group such that no nontrivial element in this subgroup cobounds a genus \(\leq N\) cobordism to an alternating knot. Moreover, when working in the smooth category their examples can be chosen to be topologically slice. Finally, they use analogous techniques to bound the number of double points in a singular concordance to an alternating knot.