English

Deep and shallow slice knots in 4-manifolds

Geometric Topology 2021-06-11 v3

Abstract

We consider slice disks for knots in the boundary of a smooth compact 4-manifold X4X^{4}. We call a knot KXK \subset \partial X deep slice in XX if there is a smooth properly embedded 2-disk in XX with boundary KK, but KK is not concordant to the unknot in a collar neighborhood X×I\partial X \times I of the boundary. We point out how this concept relates to various well-known conjectures and give some criteria for the nonexistence of such deep slice knots. Then we show, using the Wall self-intersection invariant and a result of Rohlin, that every 4-manifold consisting of just one 0- and a nonzero number of 2-handles always has a deep slice knot in the boundary. We end by considering 4-manifolds where every knot in the boundary bounds an embedded disk in the interior. A generalization of the Murasugi-Tristram inequality is used to show that there does not exist a compact, oriented 4-manifold VV with spherical boundary such that every knot KS3=VK \subset S^3 = \partial V is slice in VV via a null-homologous disk.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2009.03053,
  title  = {Deep and shallow slice knots in 4-manifolds},
  author = {Michael Klug and Benjamin Ruppik},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.03053},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

14 pages, 5 figures; v3 is the final draft which has been accepted for publication in Proceedings of the AMS, Series B; v3 includes improvements to the exposition thanks to the anonymous referee

R2 v1 2026-06-23T18:21:32.927Z