Concordance groups of links (Q691541)

Two oriented knots are said to be \textit{concordant} if the connected sum of one with the reverse mirror image of the other is \textit{slice} (i.e. it bounds a smoothly embedded disk in the 4-ball). According to \textit{R. H. Fox} and \textit{J. W. Milnor}, concordance turns out to be an equivalence relation, and the set of equivalence classes form a group under connected sum: see [Osaka J. Math. 3, 257--267 (1966; Zbl 0146.45501)]. The present paper is inspired by \textit{P. Lisca}'s work on two-bridge links and lens spaces (see [Geom. Topol. 11, 429--472 (2007; Zbl 1185.57006); Algebr. Geom. Topol. 7, 2141--2164 (2007; Zbl 1185.57015)]) and performs a generalization of the above construction to links. First of all, a link is said to be \textit{\(\chi\)-slice} if it bounds a smoothly properly embedded surface \(F\) in \(\mathbb D^4\) without closed components and with Euler characteristic equal to one. Then, the Euler characteristic is used to introduce the notion of \textit{\(\chi\)-concordance} between links; it gives rise to a concordance group of links in \(\mathbb S^3\), which has the concordance group of knots as a direct summand with infinitely generated complement. The authors consider also variants of the theory, by taking into account oriented and non-oriented surfaces, as well as smooth and locally flat embeddings.