English

Ribbon concordance and fibered predecessors, II: the general case

Geometric Topology 2026-02-25 v1

Abstract

The first and third authors recently proved that for each knot KS3K\subset S^3 there are only finitely many hyperbolic fibered knots which are ribbon concordant to KK. In this paper, we remove the hyperbolic constraint, proving that every knot in S3S^3 has only finitely many fibered predecessors under ribbon concordance. The key new input is an inequality relating the knot Floer homology of a generalized satellite knot with that of its companion, proved via the immersed curves formulation of bordered Heegaard Floer homology, which should be of independent interest. Our work, together with results of Kojima--McShane, also leads to an explicit upper bound on the Gromov norm of the complement of any fibered predecessor of a knot KS3K \subset S^3, in terms of the arc index and genus of KK.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.21109,
  title  = {Ribbon concordance and fibered predecessors, II: the general case},
  author = {John A. Baldwin and Jonathan Hanselman and Steven Sivek},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.21109},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

32 pages, 3 figures