An important difference between high-dimensional smooth manifolds and smooth
–manifolds that
in a
–manifold
it is not always possible to represent every middle-dimensional homology class
with a smoothly embedded sphere. This is true even among the simplest
–manifolds:
obtained by
attaching an
–framed
–handle to
the
–ball
along a knot
in
. The
–shake genus
of
records the
minimal genus among all smooth embedded surfaces representing a generator of the second
homology of
and is clearly bounded above by the slice genus of
. We prove that slice genus
is not an invariant of
,
and thereby provide infinitely many examples of knots with
–shake
genus strictly less than slice genus. This resolves Problem 1.41 of
Kirby’s 1997 problem list. As corollaries we show that Rasmussen’s
invariant is
not a
–trace
invariant and we give examples, via the satellite operation, of bijective maps on the
smooth concordance group which fix the identity but do not preserve slice genus.
These corollaries resolve some questions from a conference at the Max Planck
Institute, Bonn (2016).
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