The relative Whitney trick and its applications
The topological Whitney trick in 4 dimensions is an operation that removes a pair of oppositely signed transverse intersection points between two locally flat immersed surfaces. In this paper a relative Whitney trick is introduced, which removes a single point of intersection between properly immersed locally flat surfaces in a 4-manifold with boundary. The relative Whitney trick is applied to the study of links in homology 3-spheres. One of the main results shows that every link in a homology sphere \(Y\) is freely homotopic to a freely slice link, that is, to a link that bounds a collection of disjoint locally flat embedded disks in a contractible topological 4-manifold \(X\) bounded by \(Y\). It is a conjecture that every link in a homology sphere \(Y\) is homology concordant to a link in \(S^3\) (the corresponding statement in the smooth category is false). Some evidence is given for this conjecture, for it is shown that if \(L\) is a link in \(Y\), then there is a link \(J\) in \(S^3\) and a simply connected homology cobordism from \(Y\) to \(S^3\) such that the components of \(L\) and \(J\) cobound disjoint immersed annuli in the cobordism. A link \(L \subset Y\) is 4D-homotopically trivial if it bounds disjoint immersed disks in a contractible 4-manifold. The homotopy trivializing number \(n_h(L)\) is defined to be the minimum number of crossing changes required to transform \(L\) into a 4D-homotopically trivial link. It is proved that the number \(n_h(L)\) can be computed by counting the intersections between distinct generically immersed disks bounded by the link in a contractible 4-manifold.
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