Complexity of Unknotting of Trivial 2-knots
Metric Geometry
2019-12-17 v3 Geometric Topology
Abstract
We construct families of trivial -knots in such that the maximal complexity of -knots in any isotopy connecting with the standard unknot grows faster than a tower of exponentials of any fixed height of the complexity of . Here we can either construct as smooth embeddings and measure their complexity as the ropelength (a.k.a the crumpledness) or construct PL-knots , consider isotopies through PL knots, and measure the complexity of a PL-knot as the minimal number of flat -simplices in its triangulation. These results contrast with the situation of classical knots in , where every unknot can be untied through knots of complexity that is only polynomially higher than the complexity of the initial knot.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1510.02773,
title = {Complexity of Unknotting of Trivial 2-knots},
author = {Boris Lishak and Alexander Nabutovsky},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.02773},
year = {2019}
}