English

Doubly slicing knots and embedding 3-manifolds in 4-manifolds

Geometric Topology 2026-02-05 v1

Abstract

For a knot KK in the 3-sphere and a simply connected closed 4-manifold XX, we define the XX-double slice genus of KK, extending the notion from the case when XX is the 4-sphere. We show that for each integer nn, there exists an algebraically doubly slice and ribbon knot KK whose XX-double slice genus is greater than nn. Our arguments use new L2L^2-signature obstructions to embedding closed 3-manifolds with infinite cyclic first homology into closed 4-manifolds with infinite cyclic fundamental group, in a way that preserves first homology. We also extend the concept of the superslice genus of a knot to simply connected 4-manifolds and show that there exist doubly slice knots whose generalized superslice genera are arbitrarily large. Furthermore, we define the double stabilizing number of a knot, extending the stabilizing number introduced by Conway and Nagel, and show that this invariant can also be arbitrarily large.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.04334,
  title  = {Doubly slicing knots and embedding 3-manifolds in 4-manifolds},
  author = {Se-Goo Kim and Taehee Kim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.04334},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

18 pages, 1 figure