Seifert surfaces in the 4-ball
We answer a question of Livingston from 1982 by producing Seifert surfaces of the same genus for a knot in S^{3} that do not become isotopic when their interiors are pushed into B^{4} . In particular, we identify examples where the surfaces are not even topologically isotopic in B^{4} , examples that are topologically but not smoothly isotopic, and examples of infinite families of surfaces that are distinct only up to isotopy rel. boundary. Our main proofs distinguish surfaces using the cobordism maps on Khovanov homology, and our calculations demonstrate the stability and computability of these maps under certain satellite operations.
Authors
- Isaac Sundberg (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8680-244X)
- Kyle Hayden (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8910-4804)
- Maggie Miller (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1669-1956)
- JungHwan Park (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5578-5616)
Institutions
- Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (US)
- Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KR)
- Max Planck Institute for Mathematics (DE)
- Sungkyunkwan University (KR)
- The University of Texas at Austin (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Journal of the European Mathematical Society
- Published
- 2025-09-29
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.4171/jems/1703
- Citations
- 1
- Primary Topic
- Geometric and Algebraic Topology
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 4.09