Ribbonness of a stable-ribbon surface-link. I: A stably trivial surface-link

DOI10.1016/J.TOPOL.2020.107522MaRDI QIDQ820666zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Akio Kawauchi

Publication date 27 September 2021

Published in Topology and its Applications (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.02654

zbMATH Keywords

orthogonal 2-handle pair stably trivial surface-link trivial surface-link

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

General topology of 4-manifolds (57K40) Higher-dimensional knots and links (57K45)

Abstract: There is a question asking whether a handle-irreducible summand of every stable-ribbon surface-link is a unique ribbon surface-link. This question for the case of a trivial surface-link is affirmatively answered. That is, a handle-irreducible summand of every stably trivial surface-link is only a trivial 2-link. By combining this result with an old result of F. Hosowaka and the author that every surface-knot with infinite cyclic fundamental group is a stably trivial surface-knot, it is concluded that every surface-knot with infinite cyclic fundamental group is a trivial (i.e., an unknotted) surface-knot.

Review text

A surface-link is a closed oriented surface smoothly embedded in \(\mathbb{R}^4\), and when it is connected, it is called a surface-knot. In particular, the disjoint union of embedded 2-spheres is called a 2-link, and an embedded torus is called a torus-knot. A surface-link is trivial if it bounds the union of mutually disjoint handlebodies smoothly embedded in \(\mathbb{R}^4\). A stabilization of a surface-link \(F\) is a connected sum of \(F\) and a system of trivial torus-knots. A surface-link is stably trivial if its stabilization is a trivial surface-link. A handle-irreducible summand of a surface-link \(F\) is a surface-link with minimal total genus such that its stabilization is equivalent to \(F\). \newline The main result is that any handle-irreducible summand of every stably trivial surface-link is a trivial 2-link. This implies that every stably trivial surface-link is a trivial surface-link. By a result due to Hosokawa and the author [\textit{F. Hosokawa} and \textit{A. Kawauchi}, Osaka J. Math. 16, 233--248 (1979; Zbl 0404.57020)], for a surface-knot \(F\) such that the fundamental group \(\pi_1(\mathbb{R}^4 \backslash F)\) is an infinite cyclic group, \(F\) is a stably trivial surface-knot. Hence the main result implies that a surface-knot \(F\) is trivial if and only if the fundamental group \(\pi_1(\mathbb{R}^4 \backslash F)\) is an infinite cyclic group, and this answers affirmatively the Unknotting Conjecture for \(n=2\) in the smooth category and it changes to the Unknotting Theorem: A smooth \(S^n\)-knot \(K^n\) in \(S^{n+2}\) is unknotted if and only if the complement \(S^{n+2} \backslash K^n\) is homotopy equivalent to \(S^1\) for every \(n \geq 1\). \newline The main result is shown using surgery of a surface-link on an orthogonal 2-handle pair, where an orthogonal 2-handle pair on a surface-link \(F\) is a pair of 2-handles \((D \times I, D' \times I)\) on \(F\) satisfying a certain condition, described as the condition that \(\partial D \times I\) and \(\partial D' \times I\) meet orthogonally on \(F\). The author shows that the following are equivalent: (1) Every stably trivial surface-link is a trivial surface-link, and (2) Any trivial surface-link has only a unique orthogonal 2-handle pair. And the author shows that any surface-link, in particular, any trivial surface-link, has only a unique orthogonal 2-handle pair.

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