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 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 , 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