English

Concordance group and stable commutator length in braid groups

Geometric Topology 2015-11-25 v5 Group Theory

Abstract

We define a quasihomomorphism from braid groups to the concordance group of knots and examine its properties and consequences of its existence. In particular, we provide a relation between the stable four ball genus in the concordance group and the stable commutator length in braid groups, and produce examples of infinite families of concordance classes of knots with uniformly bounded four ball genus. We also provide applications to the geometry of the infinite braid group. In particular, we show that its commutator subgroup admits a stably unbounded conjugation invariant norm. This answers an open problem posed by Burago, Ivanov and Polterovich.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1402.3191,
  title  = {Concordance group and stable commutator length in braid groups},
  author = {Michael Brandenbursky and Jarek Kędra},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1402.3191},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

25 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T03:07:45.359Z