English

Knot concordance and homology cobordism

Geometric Topology 2013-03-26 v1

Abstract

We consider the question: "If the zero-framed surgeries on two oriented knots in the 3-sphere are integral homology cobordant, preserving the homology class of the positive meridians, are the knots themselves concordant?" We show that this question has a negative answer in the smooth category, even for topologically slice knots. To show this we first prove that the zero-framed surgery on K is Z-homology cobordant to the zero-framed surgery on many of its winding number one satellites P(K). Then we prove that in many cases the tau and s-invariants of K and P(K) differ. Consequently neither tau nor s is an invariant of the smooth homology cobordism class of the zero-framed surgery. We also show, that a natural rational version of this question has a negative answer in both the topological and smooth categories, by proving similar results for K and its (p,1)-cables.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1102.5730,
  title  = {Knot concordance and homology cobordism},
  author = {Tim D. Cochran and Bridget D. Franklin and Matthew Hedden and Peter D. Horn},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1102.5730},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

15 pages, 8 figures