Singular branched covers of four-manifolds

Authors Patricia Cahn, Alexandra Kjuchukova

Publication date 31 October 2017

Low-dimensional topology of special (e.g., branched) coverings (57M12)

Abstract: Consider a dihedral cover

f : Y o X

with

X

and

Y

four-manifolds and

f

branched along an oriented surface embedded in

X

with isolated cone singularities. We prove that only a slice knot can arise as the unique singularity on an irregular dihedral cover

f : Y o S^{4}

if

Y

is homotopy equivalent to

m a t h b b {C P}^{2}

and construct an explicit infinite family of such covers with

Y

diffeomorphic to

m a t h b b {C P}^{2}

. An obstruction to a knot being homotopically ribbon arises in this setting, and we describe a class of potential counter-examples to the Slice-Ribbon Conjecture. Our tools include lifting a trisection of a singularly embedded surface in a four-manifold

X

to obtain a trisection of the corresponding irregular dihedral branched cover of

X

, when such a cover exists. We also develop a combinatorial procedure to compute, using a formula by the second author, the contribution to the signature of the covering manifold which results from the presence of a singularity on the branching set.

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