Geometric Analysis and Topology Seminar

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Satellite Operators and Piecewise-Linear Concordance

Speaker: Adam Levine, Princeton

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 517

Date: Friday, October 24, 2014, 1 p.m.

Synopsis:

Every knot in the 3-sphere bounds a piecewise-linear (PL) disk in the 4-ball, but Akbulut showed in 1990 that the same is not true for knots in the boundary of an arbitrary contractible 4-manifold. We strengthen this result by showing that there exists a knot K in a homology sphere Y (which is the boundary of a contractible 4-manifold) such that K does not bound a PL disk in any homology 4-ball bounded by Y. The proof relies on using bordered Heegaard Floer homology to show that the action of a certain satellite operator on the knot concordance group is not surjective.