English

On the nonorientable four-ball genus of torus knots

Geometric Topology 2025-09-22 v2

Abstract

The nonorientable four-ball genus of a knot KK in S3S^3 is the minimal first Betti number of nonorientable surfaces in B4B^4 bounded by KK. 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 γ4\gamma_4 of any knot. This bound is sharp for several families of torus knots, including T4n,(2n±1)2T_{4n,(2n\pm 1)^2} for even n2n\ge 2, a family Longo showed were counterexamples to Batson's conjecture. We also prove that, whenever pp is an even positive integer and p2\frac{p}{2} is not a perfect square, the torus knot Tp,qT_{p,q} does not bound a locally flat M\"obius band for almost all integers qq relatively prime to pp.

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