On a nonorientable analogue of the Milnor conjecture (Q2667204)

The nonorientable smooth 4-genus of a knot is the minimal first Betti number among all nonorientable surfaces smoothly and properly embedded in the 4-ball with the knot as their boundary. Since Kronheimer and Mrowka's solution of Milnor's conjecture, the smooth 4-genus for orientable surfaces is well-understood in the case of torus knots. The article under review investigates the situation in the nonorientable setting. A simple construction of nonoriented surfaces bounding torus knots works via so-called \emph{pinch moves}, given by adding a blackboard-framed 1-handle between two strands in a standard diagram of the torus knot. Pinch moves can be used to reduce a torus knot to the unknot, providing a nonorientable slice surface for the knot whose first Betti number equals the number of pinch moves carried out. \textit{J. Batson} provided first examples where surfaces obtained by this construction realise the nonorientable smooth 4-genus and conjectured that this might be the case for all torus knots [Math. Res. Lett. 21, No. 3, 423--436 (2014; Zbl 1308.57004)]. Batson's conjecture was disproven by \textit{A. Lobb} who showed that the (4,9)-torus knot bounds a smooth Möbius strip in the 4-ball, while it requires two pinch moves to be reduced to the unknot [ibid.. 26, No. 6, 1789 (2019; Zbl 1470.57018)]. Lobb's counterexample was generalised to infinite families by various authors, and the last section of the article under review also mentions a way of how this can be done. The main contribution of the article under review consists of a positive answer to Batson's conjecture for new infinite families of torus knots. The method is based on an inequality due to Ozsváth, Stipsicz and Szabó, stating that the nonorientable smooth 4-genus is bounded from below by the absolute value of the difference of the upsilon invariant and one-half the signature invariant of the knot [\textit{P. S. Ozsváth} et al., Int. Math. Res. Not. 2017, No. 17, 5137--5181 (2017; Zbl 1405.57024)]. The main technical contribution of the paper is then to understand this difference for torus knots, and in particular its behaviour under pinch moves. This study is based on the formula for the signature by \textit{C. McA. Gordon} et al. [Can. J. Math. 33, 381--394 (1981; Zbl 0469.57004)], and on the formula for the upsilon invariant by \textit{P. Feller} and \textit{D. Krcatovich} [Math. Ann. 369, No. 1--2, 301--329 (2017; Zbl 1383.57003)].