Milnor invariants and twisted Whitney towers

DOI10.1112/JTOPOL/JTT025zbMATH Open1312.57007arXiv1102.0758OpenAlexW3106502862MaRDI QIDQ2879008FDOQ2879008

Authors: James Conant, Rob Schneiderman, Peter Teichner 

Publication date: 5 September 2014

Published in: Journal of Topology (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: This paper describes the relationship between the first non-vanishing Milnor invariants of a classical link and the intersection invariant of a twisted Whitney tower. This is a certain 2-complex in the 4-ball, built from immersed disks bounded by the given link in the 3-sphere together with finitely many `layers' of Whitney disks. The intersection invariant is a higher-order generalization of the intersection number between two immersed disks in the 4-ball, well known to give the linking number of the link on the boundary, which measures intersections among the Whitney disks and the disks bounding the given link, together with information that measures the twists (framing obstructions) of the Whitney disks. This interpretation of Milnor invariants as higher-order intersection invariants plays a key role in the classifications of both the framed and twisted Whitney tower filtrations on link concordance (as sketched in this paper). Here we show how to realize the higher-order Arf invariants, which also play a role in the classifications, and derive new geometric characterizations of links with vanishing Milnor invariants of length less than or equal to 2k.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.0758

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zbMATH Keywords

filtrationintersection numberMilnor invariantsframingrooted treegropeWhitney disk(framed) twisted Whitney towergeometrically \(k\)-slicehigher order Arf invariant

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Trees (05C05) Fundamental group, presentations, free differential calculus (57M05) Cobordism and concordance in PL-topology (57Q60) Relations of low-dimensional topology with graph theory (57M15) Graph theory (05Cxx)

Cited In (18)

• The relative Whitney trick and its applications
• Johnson-Levine homomorphisms and the tree reduction of the LMO functor
• Introduction to Whitney towers
• Geometric filtrations of string links and homology cylinders
• Embedding spheres in knot traces
• Whitney towers and abelian invariants of knots
• A note on surfaces in \(\mathbb{CP}^2\) and \(\mathbb{CP}^2\#\mathbb{CP}^2\)
• Tree homology and a conjecture of Levine
• Whitney tower concordance of classical links
• Classification of string links up to \(2n\)-moves and link-homotopy
• Embedding surfaces in 4-manifolds
• Stable concordance of knots in 3-manifolds
• Unknotted gropes, Whitney towers, and doubly slicing knots
• Abelian invariants of doubly slice links
• Characterization of the reduced peripheral system of links
• Cochran's βi-invariants via twisted Whitney towers
• Rational Whitney tower filtration of links
• Higher-order intersections in low-dimensional topology

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