English

Shake genus and slice genus

Geometric Topology 2019-10-23 v2

Abstract

An important difference between high dimensional smooth manifolds and smooth 4-manifolds that in a 4-manifold it is not always possible to represent every middle dimensional homology class with a smoothly embedded sphere. This is true even among the simplest 4-manifolds: X0(K)X_0(K) obtained by attaching an 00-framed 2-handle to the 4-ball along a knot KK in S3S^3. The 00-shake genus of KK records the minimal genus among all smooth embedded surfaces representing a generator of the second homology of X0(K)X_0(K) and is clearly bounded above by the slice genus of KK. We prove that slice genus is not an invariant of X0(K)X_0(K), and thereby provide infinitely many examples of knots with 00-shake genus strictly less than slice genus. This resolves Problem 1.41 of [Kir97]. As corollaries we show that Rasmussen's ss invariant is not a 00-trace invariant and we give examples, via the satellite operation, of bijective maps on the smooth concordance group which fix the identity but do not preserve slice genus. These corollaries resolve some questions from [4MKC16].

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1803.09834,
  title  = {Shake genus and slice genus},
  author = {Lisa Piccirillo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.09834},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

15 pages, 10 figures. Minor simplification of Example 2.4 to remove dependence on the equivalence of Rasmussen's s invariant and it's gauge-theoretic counterpart. Restatement of Theorem 2.1 for clarity

R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:05:47.577Z