Hopf plumbing, arborescent Seifert surfaces, baskets, espaliers, and homogeneous braids (Q5951980)

The paper discusses relationships between Seifert surfaces which are constructed in different ways. One construction is through successive plumbing of twisted annuli along properly embedded arcs. This yields three different types of surfaces: Hopf-plumbed surfaces (in which all annuli are single-twisted), baskets (in which all annuli are plumbed along arcs contained in a central disk) and arborescent Seifert surfaces (in which the plumbing occurs along a transverse arc of a previous plumband). The other construction is that of a braided Seifert surface [\textit{L. Rudolph}, Comment. Math. Helv. 58, 1-37 (1983; Zbl 0522.57017)]. Special types of braided Seifert surfaces are the \(\mathcal{T}\)-bandword surfaces and homogeneous \(\mathcal{T}\)-bandword surfaces which are constructed using a special embedding of a planar tree \(T\) called an espalier. The exact definition is too involved to be stated in this review. The author discusses a variety of relationships between these different surfaces some of which are new. The main result of the article is the following: Any Hopf-plumbed basket is isotopic to a homogeneous \(\mathcal{T}\)-bandword surface. For \(\mathcal{T}\)-bandword surface \(S\) the following are equivalent: \(S\) is a homogeneous \(\mathcal{T}\)-bandword surface, \(S\) is a Hopf-plumbed basket, \(S\) is a fiber surface and \(S\) is incompressible and connected.