English

Quandle presentations of surface knots in 4-manifolds and bridge numbers

Geometric Topology 2026-05-15 v1

Abstract

The fundamental quandle is an invariant for distinguishing surface knots, yet computable presentations have traditionally been limited to surfaces embedded in the 44-sphere. Building on the framework of banded unlink diagrams introduced by Hughes, Kim, and Miller, we give a Wirtinger type presentation of the fundamental quandle of surface links in arbitrary 44-manifolds. As applications, we extend the work of Sato and Tanaka to show that for any b4b \geq 4 and m0m \geq 0, there exist infinitely many pairwise non-local surface knots with bridge number bb in CP2#mCP2\mathbb{C}P^2 \#m\overline{\mathbb{C}P^2}, and we distinguish infinite families of surface knots with isomorphic knot groups, extending results of Tanaka and Taniguchi.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.14593,
  title  = {Quandle presentations of surface knots in 4-manifolds and bridge numbers},
  author = {Xiaozhou Zhou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.14593},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

25 pages, 10 figures