English

Branched covers bounding rational homology balls

Geometric Topology 2022-01-05 v2

Abstract

Prime power fold cyclic branched covers along smoothly slice knots all bound rational homology balls. This phenomenon, however, does not characterize slice knots. In this paper, we give a new construction of non-slice knots that have the above property. The sliceness obstruction comes from computing twisted Alexander polynomials, and we introduce new techniques to simplify their calculation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2002.10324,
  title  = {Branched covers bounding rational homology balls},
  author = {Paolo Aceto and Jeffrey Meier and Allison N. Miller and Maggie Miller and JungHwan Park and András I. Stipsicz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.10324},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

19 pages, 5 figures, Version 2: Minor changes to abstract and introduction. Added references on knots that are not concordant to their reverses

R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:51:49.422Z