The relative Whitney trick and its applications
type: Item
instance of: scholarly article
title: The relative Whitney trick and its applications
zbMATH Open document ID: 1500.57003
author: Patrick Orson
author: Junghwan Park
author: Christopher W. Davis
published in: Selecta Mathematica. New Series
publication date: 2022-01-07T00:00:00Z
full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.06449
review text: 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.
reviewed by: Mario Eudave-Muñoz
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 57K10
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 57N70
zbMATH DE Number: 7453888
zbMATH Keywords: link concordance
zbMATH Keywords: Whitney trick
zbMATH Keywords: relative Whitney trick
zbMATH Keywords: freely slice link
zbMATH Keywords: Whitney tower
zbMATH Keywords: homotopically trivial link
MaRDI profile type: MaRDI publication profile
OpenAlex ID: W4206422056
arXiv ID: 2104.06449
cites work: A solution to a conjecture of Zeeman
cites work: Homotopy of Knots and the Alexander Polynomial
cites work: The Disc Embedding Theorem
cites work: Rational Whitney tower filtration of links
cites work: A family of freely slice good boundary links
cites work: Whitney tower concordance of classical links
cites work: Milnor invariants and twisted Whitney towers
cites work: Chern-Simons functional and the homology cobordism group
cites work: Concordance, Crossing Changes, and Knots in Homology Spheres
cites work: Topological concordance of knots in homology spheres and the solvable filtration
cites work: The topology of four-dimensional manifolds
cites work: Q4040346
cites work: 4-manifold topology. II: Dwyer's filtration and surgery kernels
cites work: The Classification of Links up to Link-Homotopy
cites work: NONSURJECTIVE SATELLITE OPERATORS AND PIECEWISE-LINEAR CONCORDANCE
cites work: Q4658185
cites work: Link groups
cites work: Ends of Maps. II
cites work: Topological transversality holds in all dimensions
cites work: Pulling apart 2-spheres in 4-manifolds
cites work: On the dunce hat
cites work: Homology concordance and an infinite rank free subgroup
DOI: 10.1007/S00029-021-00738-Y
description: scientific article