English

Nonorientable four-ball genus can be arbitrarily large

Geometric Topology 2012-04-11 v1

Abstract

The nonorientable four-ball genus of a knot K is the smallest first Betti number of any smoothly embedded, nonorientable surface F in B^4 bounding K. In contrast to the orientable four-ball genus, which is bounded below by the Murasugi signature, the Ozsvath-Szabo tau-invariant, the Rasmussen s-invariant, the best lower bound in the literature on the nonorientable four-ball genus for any K is 3. We find a lower bound in terms of the signature of K and the Heegaard-Floer d-invariant of the integer homology sphere given by -1 surgery on K. In particular, we prove that the nonorientable four-ball genus of the torus knot T(2k,2k-1) is k-1.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1204.1985,
  title  = {Nonorientable four-ball genus can be arbitrarily large},
  author = {Joshua Batson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1204.1985},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

11 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T20:46:53.250Z