Kawauchi's second duality and knotted surfaces in 4-sphere (Q920435)

This paper is concerned with smooth oriented pairs \((S^ 4,\Sigma)\), where \(\Sigma\) is a closed surface. The first homology of M, the complement of an open tubular neighbourhood of \(\Sigma\), is infinite cyclic by Alexander duality. This set-up has much in common with knot theory (the case \(\Sigma =S^ 2)\), and the main result here is a geometric interpretation of Kawauchi's second duality theorem, which gives a generalization of the linking pairings of M. S. Farber and J. Levine, concerning \(H_*(\tilde M)\) and \(H_*(\tilde M,\partial \tilde M)\) where \(\tilde M\) is the infinite cyclic covering of M. As in knot theory, the homology groups are considered as modules over \({\mathbb{Z}}[t,t^{-1}].\) The connected sum of two knotted surfaces is defined in the obvious way, and a surface is irreducible if it is not the sum of another knotted surface and an unknotted torus. Two knotted surfaces are stably equivalent if they become pairwise diffeomorphic after taking the connected sum with some unknotted tori. It is shown that given a positive integer n, there exist n knotted surfaces in \(S^ 4\) which have isomorphic groups and peripheral subgroups, but which are not stably equivalent to each other.