English

L-spaces and knot traces

Geometric Topology 2026-03-16 v2

Abstract

There has been a great deal of interest in understanding which knots are characterized by which of their Dehn surgeries. We study a 4-dimensional version of this question: which knots are determined by which of their traces? We prove several results that are in stark contrast with what is known about characterizing surgeries, most notably that the 0-trace detects every L-space knot. Our proof combines tools in Heegaard Floer homology with results about surface homeomorphisms and their dynamics. We also consider nonzero traces, proving for instance that each positive torus knot is determined by its nn-trace for any n0n\leq 0, whereas no non-positive integer is known to be a characterizing slope for any positive torus knot besides the right-handed trefoil.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.00914,
  title  = {L-spaces and knot traces},
  author = {John A. Baldwin and Steven Sivek},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.00914},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

37 pages, 1 figure; v2: accepted version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:54:04.385Z