Hopf plumbing, arborescent Seifert surfaces, baskets, espaliers, and homogeneous braids

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Abstract: Four constructions of Seifert surfaces - Hopf plumbing, arborescent plumbing, basketry, and T-bandword handle decomposition - are described, and some interrelationships found, e.g.: arborescent Seifert surfaces are baskets; Hopf-plumbed baskets are precisely homogeneous T-bandword surfaces. A Seifert surface is Hopf-plumbed if it is a 2-disk D or if it can be constructed by plumbing a positive or negative Hopf annulus A(O,-1) or A(O,1) to a Hopf-plumbed surface along a proper arc. A Seifert surface is a basket if it is D or it can be constructed by plumbing an n-twisted unknotted annulus A(O,n) to a basket along a proper arc in D. A Seifert surface is arborescent if it is D, or it is A(O,n), or it can be constructed by plumbing A(O,n) to an arborescent Seifert surface along a transverse arc of an annulus plumband. Every arborescent Seifert surface is a basket. A tree T embedded in the complex plane C determines a set of generators for a braid group. An espalier is a tree in the closed lower halfplane with vertices on the real line R. If T is an espalier then words b in the T-generators correspond nicely to T-bandword surfaces S(b). (For example, if I is an espalier with an edge from p to p+1 for p=1,...,n-1, then the I-generators of the n-string braid group are the standard generators; when Seifert's algorithm is applied to the closed braid diagram of a word in those generators, the result is an I-bandword surface.) Theorem. For any espalier T, a T-bandword surface S(b) is a Hopf-plumbed basket iff b is homogeneous iff S(b) is a fiber surface iff S(b) is connected and incompressible. A Hopf-plumbed basket S (for instance, an arborescent fiber surface) is isotopic to a homogeneous T-bandword surface for some espalier T.


The paper discusses relationships between Seifert surfaces which are constructed in different ways. One construction is through successive plumbing of twisted annuli along properly embedded arcs. This yields three different types of surfaces: Hopf-plumbed surfaces (in which all annuli are single-twisted), baskets (in which all annuli are plumbed along arcs contained in a central disk) and arborescent Seifert surfaces (in which the plumbing occurs along a transverse arc of a previous plumband). The other construction is that of a braided Seifert surface [\textit{L. Rudolph}, Comment. Math. Helv. 58, 1-37 (1983; Zbl 0522.57017)]. Special types of braided Seifert surfaces are the \(\mathcal{T}\)-bandword surfaces and homogeneous \(\mathcal{T}\)-bandword surfaces which are constructed using a special embedding of a planar tree \(T\) called an espalier. The exact definition is too involved to be stated in this review. The author discusses a variety of relationships between these different surfaces some of which are new. The main result of the article is the following: Any Hopf-plumbed basket is isotopic to a homogeneous \(\mathcal{T}\)-bandword surface. For \(\mathcal{T}\)-bandword surface \(S\) the following are equivalent: \(S\) is a homogeneous \(\mathcal{T}\)-bandword surface, \(S\) is a Hopf-plumbed basket, \(S\) is a fiber surface and \(S\) is incompressible and connected.











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