Knot concordances and alternating knots

From MaRDI portal
Publication:2363559



Abstract: There is an infinitely generated free subgroup of the smooth knot concordance group with the property that no nontrivial element in this subgroup can be represented by an alternating knot. This subgroup has the further property that every element is represented by a topologically slice knot.


This paper contains several results demonstrating that the knot concordance group \(\mathcal{C}\) is much larger than the subgroup generated by alternating knots, in both the smooth and topological categories. The authors describe a variety of invariants, derived from the Tristram-Levine signature function and Heegaard Floer knot homology, that they use to bound the minimal genus of a cobordism to an alternating knot. Their main result is that for any \(N>0\) there is an infinite rank free subgroup of the concordance group such that no nontrivial element in this subgroup cobounds a genus \(\leq N\) cobordism to an alternating knot. Moreover, when working in the smooth category their examples can be chosen to be topologically slice. Finally, they use analogous techniques to bound the number of double points in a singular concordance to an alternating knot.











This page was built for publication: Knot concordances and alternating knots

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q2363559)