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Nonorientable link cobordisms and torsion order in Floer homologies

Sherry Gong and Marco Marengon
Algebraic & Geometric Topology 23 (2023) 2627–2672
DOI: 10.2140/agt.2023.23.2627
Abstract

We use unoriented versions of instanton and knot Floer homology to prove inequalities involving the Euler characteristic and the number of local maxima appearing in nonorientable cobordisms, which mirror results of a recent paper by Juhász, Miller and Zemke concerning orientable cobordisms. Most of the subtlety in our argument lies in the fact that maps for nonorientable cobordisms require more complicated decorations than their orientable counterparts. We introduce unoriented versions of the band unknotting number and the refined cobordism distance and apply our results to give bounds on these based on the torsion orders of the Floer homologies. Finally, we show that the difference between the unoriented refined cobordism distance of a knot K from the unknot and the nonorientable slice genus of K can be arbitrarily large.

Keywords
link cobordisms, nonorientable surfaces, knot Floer homology, instanton Floer homology
Mathematical Subject Classification
Primary: 57K18
Secondary: 57K16
References
Publication
Received: 1 December 2020
Revised: 12 October 2021
Accepted: 28 April 2022
Published: 7 September 2023
Authors
Sherry Gong
Department of Mathematics
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX
United States
http://www.people.tamu.edu/~sgongli
Marco Marengon
Alfréd Rényi Institute for Mathematics
Budapest
Hungary
https://users.renyi.hu/~marengon/
© 2023 MSP (Mathematical Sciences Publishers). Distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY).

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