Monday, 14 December 2009

knot theory - slice-ribbon for links (surely it's wrong)

The slice-ribbon conjecture asserts that all slice knots are ribbon.



This assumes the context:



1) A `knot' is a smooth embedding $S^1 to S^3$. We're thinking of the 3-sphere as the boundary of the 4-ball $S^3 = partial D^4$.



2) A knot being slice means that it's the boundary of a 2-disc smoothly embedded in $D^4$.



3) A slice disc being ribbon is a more fussy definition -- a slice disc is in ribbon position if the distance function $d(p) = |p|^2$ is Morse on the slice disc and having no local maxima. A slice knot is a ribbon knot if one of its slice discs has a ribbon position.



My question is this. All the above definitions have natural generalizations to links in $S^3$. You can talk about a link being slice if it's the boundary of disjointly embedded discs in $D^4$. Similarly, the above ribbon definition makes sense for slice links. Are there simple examples of $n$-component links with $n geq 2$ that are slice but not ribbon? Presumably this question has been investigated in the literature, but I haven't come across it. Standard references like Kawauchi don't mention this problem (as far as I can tell).

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