In this article it is proven that if a knot, K, bounds an imbedded grope of class n, then the knot is n/2-trivial in the sense of Gusarov and Stanford. That is, all type n/2 invariants vanish on K. We also give a simple way to construct all knots bounding a grope of a given class. It is further shown that this result is optimal in the sense that for any n there exist gropes which are not n/2+1- trivial.
We study the structure of the exteriors of gropes and Whitney towers in dimension 4, focusing on their fundamental groups. In particular we introduce a notion of unknottedness of gropes and Whitney towers in the 4-sphere. We prove that various modifications of gropes and Whitney towers preserve the unknottedness and do not enlarge the fundamental group. We exhibit handlebody structures of the exteriors of gropes and Whitney towers constructed by earlier methods of Cochran, Teichner, Horn, and the first author, and use them to construct examples of unknotted gropes and Whitney towers. As an app…
We explain the notion of a grope cobordism between two knots in a 3-manifold. Each grope cobordism has a type that can be described by a rooted unitrivalent tree. By filtering these trees in different ways, we show how the Goussarov-Habiro approach to finite type invariants of knots is closely related to our notion of grope cobordism. Thus our results can be viewed as a geometric interpretation of finite type invariants. An interesting refinement we study are knots modulo symmetric grope cobordism in 3-space. On one hand this theory maps onto the usual Vassiliev theory and on the other hand it…
We explain new developments in classical knot theory in 3 and 4~dimensions, i.e. we study knots in 3-space, up to isotopy as well as up to concordance. In dimension~3 we give a geometric interpretation of the Kontsevich integral (joint with Jim Conant), and in dimension 4 we introduce new concordance invariants using von Neumann signatures (joint with Tim Cochran and Kent Orr). The common geometric feature of our results is the notion of a grope cobordism.
We study knots of order 2 in the grope filtration $\{\G_h\}$ and the solvable filtration $\{\F_h\}$ of the knot concordance group. We show that, for any integer $n\ge4$, there are knots generating a $\Z_2^\infty$ subgroup of $\G_n/\G_{n.5}$. Considering the solvable filtration, our knots generate a $\Z_2^\infty$ subgroup of $\F_n/\F_{n.5}$ $(n\ge2)$ distinct from the subgroup generated by the previously known 2-torsion knots of Cochran, Harvey, and Leidy. We also present a result on the 2-torsion part in the Cochran, Harvey, and Leidy's primary decomposition of the solvable filtration.
A geometric characterization of the Arf invariant of a knot in the 3-sphere is given in terms of two kinds of 4-dimensional bordisms, half-gropes and Whitney towers. These types of bordisms have associated complexities class and order which filter the condition of bordism by an embedded annulus, i.e. knot concordance, and it is shown constructively that the Arf invariant is exactly the obstruction to cobording pairs of knots by half-gropes and Whitney towers of arbitrarily high class and order. This illustrates geometrically how, in the setting of knot concordance, the Vassiliev (isotopy) inva…
To a special type of grope embedded in 4-space, that we call an admissible grope, we associate a length function for each real number q at least 1. This gives rise to a family of pseudo-metrics d^q, refining the slice genus metric, on the set of concordance classes of knots, as the infimum of the length function taken over all possible grope concordances between two knots. We investigate the properties of these metrics. The main theorem is that the topology induced by this metric on the knot concordance set is not discrete for all q>1. The analogous statement for links also holds for q=1. In a…
We consider the Grope filtration of the classical knot concordance group that was introduced in a paper of Cochran, Orr and Teichner. Our main result is that successive quotients at each stage in this filtration have infinite rank. We also establish the analogous result for the Grope filtration of the concordance group of string links consisting of more than one component.
We explain how the usual algebras of Feynman diagrams behave under the grope degree introduced in "Grope cobordism of classical knots." We show that the Kontsevich integral rationally classifies grope cobordisms of knots in 3-space when the ``class'' is used to organize gropes. This implies that the grope cobordism equivalence relations are highly nontrivial in dimension three. We also show that the class is not a useful organizing complexity in four dimensions since only the Arf invariant survives. In contrast, measuring gropes according to ``height'' does lead to very interesting four-dimens…
For every integer g, we construct a 2-solvable and 2-bipolar knot whose topological 4-genus is greater than g. Note that 2-solvable knots are in particular algebraically slice and have vanishing Casson-Gordon obstructions. Similarly all known smooth 4-genus bounds from gauge theory and Floer homology vanish for 2-bipolar knots. Moreover, our knots bound smoothly embedded height four gropes in $D^4$, an a priori stronger condition than being 2-solvable. We use new lower bounds for the 4-genus arising from $L^{(2)}$-signature defects associated to meta-metabelian representations of the fundament…
The n-solvable filtration $\{\mathcal{F}_n\}_{n=0}^\infty$ of the smooth knot concordance group (denoted by $\mathcal{C}$), due to Cochran-Orr-Teichner, has been instrumental in the study of knot concordance in recent years. Part of its significance is due to the fact that certain geometric characterizations of a knot imply membership in various levels of the filtration. We show the counterpart of this fact for two new filtrations of $\mathcal{C}$ due to Cochran-Harvey-Horn, the positive and negative filtrations, denoted by $\{\mathcal{P}_n\}_{n=0}^\infty$ and $\{\mathcal{N}_n\}_{n=0}^\infty$ …
In this paper, we compute the slice genus for many low-crossing virtual knots. For instance, we show that 1295 out of 92800 virtual knots with 6 or fewer crossings are slice, and that all but 248 of the rest are not slice. Key to these results are computations of Turaev's graded genus, which we show extends to give an invariant of virtual knot concordance. The graded genus is remarkably effective as a slice obstruction, and we develop an algorithm that applies virtual unknotting operations to determine the slice genus of many virtual knots with 6 or fewer crossings.
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.
A Seifert surface for a knot K is called canonical if it can be built by applying Seifert's algorithm to some projection of K. The canonical genus of K is the smallest genus of a surface so obtained. In this paper we show that there is a bound on the volume of a hyperbolic knot which admits a canonical surface of genus g. The bound can, in fact, be chosen to be linear in g.
Fintushel and Stern showed that the Brieskorn sphere $Σ(2,3,7)$ bounds a rational homology ball, while its non-trivial Rokhlin invariant obstructs it from bounding an integral homology ball. It is known that their argument can be modified to show that the figure-eight knot is rationally slice, and we use this fact to provide the first additional examples of Brieskorn spheres that bound rational homology balls but not integral homology balls: the families $Σ(2,4n+1,12n+5)$ and $Σ(3,3n+1,12n+5)$ for $n$ odd. We also provide handlebody diagrams for a rational homology ball containing a rationally…
The algebraic genus of a knot is an invariant that arises when one considers upper bounds for the topological slice genus coming from Freedman's theorem that Alexander polynomial one knots are topologically slice. This paper develops null-homologous twisting operations as a tool for studying the algebraic genus and, consequently, for bounding the topological slice genus above. As applications we give new upper bounds on the algebraic genera of torus knots and satellite knots.
The paper deals with topologically trivial Legendrian knots in tight and overtwisted contact 3-manifolds. The first part contains a thorough exposition of the proof of the classification of topologically trivial Legendrian knots (i.e. Legendrian knots bounding embedded 2-disks) in tight contact 3-manifolds. This part was essentially written more than 10 years ago, but only a short version, without the detailed proofs, was published (in CRM Proc. Lecture Notes, Vol. 15, 1998). That paper also briefly discussed the overtwisted case. The final part of the present paper contains a more systematic …
For each rational homology 3-sphere $Y$ which bounds simply connected definite 4-manifolds of both signs, we construct an infinite family of irreducible rational homology 3-spheres which are homology cobordant to $Y$ but cannot bound any simply connected definite 4-manifold. As a corollary, for any coprime integers $p,q$, we obtain an infinite family of irreducible rational homology 3-spheres which are homology cobordant to the lens space $L(p,q)$ but cannot obtained by a knot surgery.
We develop obstructions to a knot K in the 3-sphere bounding a smooth punctured Klein bottle in the 4-ball. The simplest of these is based on the linking form of the 2-fold branched cover of the 3-sphere branched over K. Stronger obstructions are based on the Ozsvath-Szabo correction term in Heegaard-Floer homology, along with the G-signature theorem and the Guillou-Marin generalization of Rokhlin's theorem. We also apply Casson-Gordon theory to show that for every n greater than one there exists a knot that does not bound a topologically embedded nonorientable ribbon surface F in the 4-ball w…
Two fundamental objects in knot theory are the minimal genus surface and the least area surface bounded by a knot in a 3-dimensional manifold. When the knot is embedded in a general 3-manifold, the problems of finding these surfaces were shown to be NP-complete and NP-hard respectively. However, there is evidence that the special case when the ambient manifold is R^3, or more generally when the second homology is trivial, should be considerably more tractable. Indeed, we show here that a natural discrete version of the least area surface can be found in polynomial time. The precise setting is …
We investigate the properties of knots in S^3 which bound Klein bottles, such that a pushoff of the knot has zero linking number with the knot, i.e. has zero framing. This is motivated by the many results in the literature regarding slice knots of genus one, for example, the existence of homologically essential zero self-linking simple closed curves on genus one Seifert surfaces for algebraically slice knots. Given a knot K bounding a Klein bottle F with zero framing, we show that J, the core of the orientation-preserving band in any disk-band form of F, has zero self-linking. We prove that su…
We show that some hyperbolic 3-manifolds which are tessellated by copies of the regular ideal hyperbolic tetrahedron embed geodesically in a complete, finite volume, hyperbolic 4-manifold. This allows us to prove that the complement of the figure-eight knot geometrically bounds a complete, finite volume hyperbolic 4-manifold. This the first example of geometrically bounding hyperbolic knot complement and, amongst known examples of geometrically bounding manifolds, the one with the smallest volume.
Work of Ni and Zhang has shown that for the torus knot $T_{r,s}$ with $r>s>1$ every surgery slope $p/q \geq \frac{30}{67}(r^2-1)(s^2-1)$ is a characterizing slope. In this paper, we show that this can be lowered to a bound which is linear in $rs$, namely, $p/q\geq \frac{43}{4}(rs-r-s)$. The main technical ingredient in this improvement is to show that if $Y$ is an $L$-space bounding a sharp 4-manifold which is obtained by $p/q$-surgery on a knot $K$ in $S^3$ and $p/q$ exceeds $4g(K)+4$, then the Alexander polynomial of $K$ is uniquely determined by $Y$ and $p/q$. We also show that if $p/q$-sur…