Extending fibrations of knot complements to ribbon disk complements

The famous slice-ribbon conjecture of \textit{R. H. Fox} [in: Topology of 3-manifolds and related topics. Proceedings of the University of Georgia Institute 1961. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc.. 168--176 (1962; Zbl 1246.57011)] asks whether every knot that is slice (i.e. bounds a smoothly embedded disc in the 4-ball) is also ribbon (bounds a ribbon-immersed disc in the 3-sphere or, equivalently, bounds a slice disc without local maxima with respect to the radial Morse function on the 4-ball). An intermediate notion is that of being homotopy-ribbon, or bounding a slice disc such that the map induced by the inclusion from the fundamental group of the knot exterior to the fundamental group of the disc exterior is surjective. Despite a great deal of work on the matter, it remains open whether either of the inclusions \(\{\)ribbon\(\} \subseteq \{\)homotopy-ribbon\(\} \subseteq\{\)slice\(\}\) are proper. Recall that a knot \(K\) in \(S^3\) is fibered if \(S^3 \smallsetminus \nu(K)\) is homeomorphic to \(\Sigma \times_{\phi} S^1\) for \(\Sigma\) a Seifert surface for \(K\) and \(\phi\) a self-homeomorphism of \(\Sigma\) fixing \(\partial \Sigma\) pointwise. \textit{A. J. Casson} and \textit{C. McA. Gordon} [Invent. Math. 74, 119--137 (1983; Zbl 0538.57003)] gave a homotopy ribbon obstruction for fibered knots, proving that a fibered knot \(K\) is homotopy-ribbon if and only if its closed monodromy extends over some handlebody if and only if there exists a homotopy 4-ball \(V\) and a slice disc \(D \subset V\) such \((S^3, K)= \partial (V, D)\) and such that \(V \smallsetminus \nu(D)\) is itself fibered over \(S^1\) by handlebodies. This paper addresses the question of whether ribbon discs with fibered knot boundaries necessarily have fibered exteriors. The main result, Theorem 1.7, is as follows: Let \(K\) be a fibered knot bounding a ribbon disc \(D \subset B^4\), and view the index one critical points of \(D\) as fission bands attached to \(K\). If these bands can be isotoped to be transverse to the fibration on \(S^3 \smallsetminus \nu(K)\), then this fibration extends to a fibration by handlebodies on \(B^4 \smallsetminus \nu(D)\). As a consequence, the author obtains the result (Corollary 1.13) that any ribbon disc with exactly two minima and boundary a fibered knot has its exterior fibered by handlebodies. Section 6 of the paper also contains explicit fibered ribbon discs for many small fibered ribbon knots. The proof of the main result is constructive, and relies on using smoothly varying singular fibrations on the point pre-images of a Morse function on a 4-manifold to build a smooth fibration on that 4-manifold. This requires a careful analysis of different singularity types and painstakingly explicit construction of no fewer than twenty local movies representing birth/death of singularities, handle additions, and more. In addition to the impressive mathematical content, this paper is a graphical tour de force -- this reviewer particularly enjoyed contemplating Figures 29, 30, and 36.

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