Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-ksp62 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-07T08:18:06.573Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

PL-Genus of surfaces in homology balls

Part of: PL-topology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2024

Jennifer Hom
Affiliation:
School of Mathematics, Georgia Institute of Technology, 686 Cherry Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA; E-mail: hom@math.gatech.edu
Matthew Stoffregen
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, Michigan State University, 619 Red Cedar Road, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA; E-mail: stoffre1@msu.edu
Hugo Zhou
Affiliation:
School of Mathematics, Georgia Institute of Technology, 686 Cherry Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA; E-mail: hzhou@gatech.edu

Abstract

We consider manifold-knot pairs $(Y,K)$, where Y is a homology 3-sphere that bounds a homology 4-ball. We show that the minimum genus of a PL surface $\Sigma $ in a homology ball X, such that $\partial (X, \Sigma ) = (Y, K)$ can be arbitrarily large. Equivalently, the minimum genus of a surface cobordism in a homology cobordism from $(Y, K)$ to any knot in $S^3$ can be arbitrarily large. The proof relies on Heegaard Floer homology.

MSC classification

Information

Type
Topology
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1 The complex $C_3^*$, defined to be the dual complex of $C_3$. The axes indicate the $\mathcal {U}$ and ${\mathcal {V}}$ actions. The solid dots are generators, marked abstractly, missing actual $\mathcal {U},{\mathcal {V}}$ decorations, and the edges represent the differentials.

Figure 1

Figure 2 The knot Floer complex $\operatorname {CFK}^\infty (S^3,-T_{6,7})$. The solid dots are generators. The differentials point to lower filtration levels, and the numbers indicate their lengths.

Figure 2

Table 1 The filtrations of the generators in the reduced basis of $\bigoplus^{2n-1}_{s=0}\ {A}_{s}$.

Figure 3

Figure 3 A reduced basis for the complex $X^\infty _{5} (-T_{6,7}) \langle 5 \rangle $, where the coordinates are given by $\mathcal {I}$ and $\mathcal {J}$ filtrations. The generators are marked abstractly, without U powers. The edges represent the differentials; the edge with $*$ depicts an instance of the fact that $\Delta _{\mathcal {I}}(\alpha _n, b_{n}^{(n)}) = \Delta _{\mathcal {I}}(\alpha _{n+1},b_{n}^{(n)}) + n $.