On the nonorientable four-ball genus of torus knots
Abstract
The nonorientable four-ball genus of a knot in is the minimal first Betti number of nonorientable surfaces in bounded by . By amalgamating ideas from involutive knot Floer homology and unoriented knot Floer homology, we give a new lower bound on the smooth nonorientable four-ball genus of any knot. This bound is sharp for several families of torus knots, including for even , a family Longo showed were counterexamples to Batson's conjecture. We also prove that, whenever is an even positive integer and is not a perfect square, the torus knot does not bound a locally flat M\"obius band for almost all integers relatively prime to .
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2109.09187,
title = {On the nonorientable four-ball genus of torus knots},
author = {Fraser Binns and Sungkyung Kang and Jonathan Simone and Paula Truöl},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.09187},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
31 pages, 8 figures. Comments are welcome! v2: Corresponds to version accepted for publication in Algebraic & Geometric Topology