English

Knots bounding non-isotopic ribbon disks

Geometric Topology 2023-10-27 v1

Abstract

We exhibit infinitely many ribbon knots, each of which bounds infinitely many pairwise non-isotopic ribbon disks whose exteriors are diffeomorphic. This family provides a positive answer to a stronger version of an old question of Hitt and Sumners. The examples arise from our main result: a classification of fibered, homotopy-ribbon disks for each generalized square knot Tp,q#Tp,qT_{p,q}\# \overline{T}_{p,q} up to isotopy. Precisely, we show that each generalized square knot bounds infinitely many pairwise non-isotopic fibered, homotopy-ribbon disks, all of whose exteriors are diffeomorphic. When q=2q=2, we prove further that infinitely many of these disks are also ribbon; whether the disks are always ribbon is an open problem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.17564,
  title  = {Knots bounding non-isotopic ribbon disks},
  author = {Jeffrey Meier and Alexander Zupan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.17564},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

15 pages, 6 color figures