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 -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 -manifolds. As applications, we extend the work of Sato and Tanaka to show that for any and , there exist infinitely many pairwise non-local surface knots with bridge number in , and we distinguish infinite families of surface knots with isomorphic knot groups, extending results of Tanaka and Taniguchi.
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