Related papers: Every negative amphichiral knot is rationally slic…

We consider slice disks for knots in the boundary of a smooth compact 4-manifold $X^{4}$. We call a knot $K \subset \partial X$ deep slice in $X$ if there is a smooth properly embedded 2-disk in $X$ with boundary $K$, but $K$ is not…

This paper compares notions of double sliceness for links. The main result is to show that a large family of 2-component Montesinos links are not strongly doubly slice despite being weakly doubly slice and having doubly slice components.…

We prove that there exist infinitely many topologically slice knots which cannot bound a smooth null-homologous disk in any definite 4-manifold. Furthermore, we show that we can take such knots so that they are linearly independent in the…

A link is called $\chi-$slice if it bounds a smooth properly embedded surface in the 4-ball with no closed components and Euler characteristic 1. If a link has a single component, then it is $\chi-$slice if and only if it is slice. One…

Double twist knots $K_{m, n}$ are known to be rationally slice if $mn = 0$, $n = -m\pm 1$, or $n = -m$. In this paper, we prove the converse. It is done by showing that infinitely many prime power-fold cyclic branched covers of the other…

We discuss an obstruction to a knot being smoothly slice that comes from minimum-genus bounds on smoothly embedded surfaces in definite 4-manifolds. As an example, we provide an alternate proof of the fact that the (2,1)-cable of the figure…

In this note, we prove a lower bound for the positive kinkiness of a closed braid which we then use to derive an estimate for the positive kinkiness of a link in terms of its Seifert system. As an application, we show that certain pretzel…

We show that every non-trivial strongly quasipositive link is smoothly concordant to infinitely many pairwise non-isotopic strongly quasipositive links. In contrast to our result, Baker conjectured that smoothly concordant strongly…

In this paper we study rational real algebraic knots in $\R P^3$. We show that two real algebraic knots of degree $\leq5$ are rigidly isotopic if and only if their degrees and encomplexed writhes are equal. We also show that any irreducible…

We show that every good boundary link with a pair of derivative links on a Seifert surface satisfying a homotopically trivial plus assumption is freely slice. This subsumes all previously known methods for freely slicing good boundary links…

For an oriented link $L \subset S^3 = \Bd\!D^4$, let $\chi_s(L)$ be the greatest Euler characteristic $\chi(F)$ of an oriented 2-manifold $F$ (without closed components) smoothly embedded in $D^4$ with boundary $L$. A knot $K$ is {\it…

Let $M$ be a closed aspherical manifold. Assume that the rational strong Novikov conjecture holds for $\pi_1(M)$. We show that on any spin surgery of $M$ along a region whose induced homomorphism on the fundamental group is trivial, every…

It is still unknown whether there is a nontrivial knot with Jones polynomial equal to that of the unknot. Tanaka shows that if an amphichiral knot is a symmetric union of the unknot with one twist region, then its Jones polynomial is…

We analyze properties of links which have diagrams with a small number of negative crossings. We show that if a nontrivial link has a diagram with all crossings positive except possibly one, then the signature of the link is negative. If a…

Conjecturally, a knot is slice if and only if its positive Whitehead double is slice. We consider an analogue of this conjecture for slice disks in the four-ball: two slice disks of a knot are smoothly isotopic if and only if their positive…

While finite graphs have tree-decompositions that efficiently distinguish all their tangles, locally finite graphs with thick ends need not have such tree-decompositions. We show that every locally finite graph without thick ends admits…

Let S(D) be the surface produced by applying Seifert's algorithm to the oriented link diagram D. I prove that if D has no negative crossings then S(D) is a quasipositive Seifert surface, that is, S(D) embeds incompressibly on a fiber…

We give a new geometric obstruction to the iterated Bing double of a knot being a slice link: for n>1 the (n+1)-st iterated Bing double of a knot is rationally slice if and only if the n-th iterated Bing double of the knot is rationally…

We prove the existence of a smoothly doubly slice, amphicheiral knot with Alexander polynomial 1 and unknotting number 5.

Let $G$ be a graph (with multiple edges allowed) and let $T$ be a tree in $G$. We say that $T$ is $\textit{even}$ if every leaf of $T$ belongs to the same part of the bipartition of $T$, and that $T$ is $\textit{weakly even}$ if every leaf…