The dihedral genus of a knot (Q784254)

There are several highly influential open questions regarding the surfaces that a knot in the 3-sphere can bound in the 4-ball. For a given type of surface (smooth, topological, locally flat, homotopy ribbon, etc.) one can ask for the minimal genus of such a surface bounded by a fixed knot \(K\). There are several relations between the different genera that one obtains in this way for a knot \(K\), but in general it is challenging to prove that a given surface really is of minimal genus (among surfaces of the relevant type). This article studies the \(p\)-dihedral genus of a knot \(K\), defined as the minimal genus of any locally flat, orientable surface \(S\) in the 4-ball, bounded by \(K\) in \(S^3\) such that some \(p\)-coloring of \(K\) extends over \(S\). The coloring of \(S\) allows a construction of a dihedral branched cover \(X\to S^4\). The authors obtain a lower bound for the \(p\)-dihedral genus, which becomes an equality if \(S\) is homotopy ribbon, \(X\) is a definite manifold and the signature of \(X\) satisfies a condition in relation to the Murasugi signature of \(K\). The formula implies that if these conditions are satisfied, then \(S\) realizes the 4-genus of \(K\). Furthermore, the authors prove for any given non-negative integer \(m\) the existence of an infinite family of knots \(K_m\), for which the 3-dihedral genus and the topological 4-genus are both equal to \(m\).