Braiding link cobordisms and non-ribbon surfaces (Q907784)

The discovery of closed braids and its applications play a fundamental role in classical knot theory, since every knot or link in 3-space can be interpreted as a closed braid. Classical knots were generalized to surface knots in 4-space, where one followed as much as possible the notions of classical knot theory. The notion of closed braid has been generalized by different authors to certain classes of surfaces in 4-space. So we got braided surfaces which generalize the classical notion of braid, so that any orientable surface embedded in 4-space is equivalent to a closed surface braid. The author of this paper introduces a braided link cobordism (or braid cobordism) in \(S^3\times [0,1]\), a generalization of Viro's surface braids in 4-space, so that braided link cobordisms are smoothly and properly embedded surfaces \(W \subset S^3\times [0,1]\) on which the projection \(\mathrm{pr}_2\) restricts as a Morse function such that each regular level set is a closed braid. The main result in this direction is the following: Let \(W \subset S^3 \times [0,1]\) be an oriented surface smoothly and properly embedded. Then \(W\) is isotopic to a braided cobordism. If the boundary link of \(\partial W\) already consists of closed braids, then this isotopy can be chosen \(\mathrm{rel}\partial W\). In order to prove the result all needed techniques are developed and nicely presented. Since these surfaces are related to the notion of braided surfaces with caps they are also included.