English

Unknotting Nonorientable Surfaces of Genus 4 and 5

Geometric Topology 2024-02-29 v1

Abstract

Expanding on work by Conway, Orson, and Powell, we study the isotopy classes rel. boundary of nonorientable, compact, locally flatly embedded surfaces in D4D^4 with knot group Z2\mathbb{Z}_2. In particular we show that if two such surfaces have fixed knot boundary KK in S4S^4 such that det(K)=1\vert \det(K) \vert =1, the same normal Euler number, and the same nonorientable genus 44 or 55, then they are ambiently isotopic rel. boundary. This implies that closed, nonorientable, locally flatly embedded surfaces in the 44-sphere with knot group Z2\mathbb{Z}_2 of nonorientable genus 44 and 55 are topologically unknotted. The proof relies on calculations, implemented in Sage, which imply that the modified surgery obstruction is elementary. Furthermore we show that this method fails for nonorientable genus 66 and 77.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2402.18290,
  title  = {Unknotting Nonorientable Surfaces of Genus 4 and 5},
  author = {Mark Pencovitch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.18290},
  year   = {2024}
}