English

Concordance invariants of doubled knots and blowing up

Geometric Topology 2018-07-12 v2

Abstract

Let ν\nu be either the Ozsv\'ath-Szab\'o τ\tau-invariant or the Rasmussen ss-invariant, suitably normalized. For a knot KK, Livingston and Naik defined the invariant tν(K)t_\nu(K) to be the minimum of kk for which ν\nu of the kk-twisted positive Whitehead double of KK vanishes. They proved that tν(K)t_\nu(K) is bounded above by TB(K)-TB(-K), where TBTB is the maximal Thurston-Bennequin number. We use a blowing up process to find a crossing change formula and a new upper bound for tνt_\nu in terms of the unknotting number. As an application, we present infinitely many knots KK such that the difference between Livingston-Naik's upper bound TB(K)-TB(-K) and tν(K)t_\nu(K) can be arbitrarily large.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1712.03486,
  title  = {Concordance invariants of doubled knots and blowing up},
  author = {Se-Goo Kim and Kwan Yong Lee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.03486},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

7 pages, 7 figures; expository changes; to appear in Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society