Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In the 1980s, Freedman showed that the Whitehead doubling operator acts trivially up to topological concordance.On the other hand, Akbulut showed that the Whitehead doubling operator acts nontrivially up to smooth concordance.The Mazur pattern is a natural candidate for a satellite operator which acts by the identity up to topological concordance but not up to smooth concordance.Recently there has been a resurgence of study of the action of the Mazur pattern up to concordance in the smooth and topological categories.Examples showing that the Mazur pattern does not act by the identity up to smooth concordance have been given by Cochran, Franklin, Hedden and Horn and by Collins.We give evidence that the Mazur pattern acts by the identity up to topological concordance.In particular, we show that two satellite operators P K 0 ;Á 0 and P K 1 ;Á 1 with Á 0 and Á 1 freely homotopic have the same action on the topological concordance group modulo the subgroup of .1/-solvableknots, which gives evidence that they act in the same way up to topological concordance.In particular, the Mazur pattern and the identity operator are related in this way, and so this is evidence for the topological side of the analogy to the Whitehead doubling operator.We give additional evidence that they have the same action on the full topological concordance group by showing that, up to topological concordance, they cannot be distinguished by Casson-Gordon invariants or metabelian -invariants.
Source: Algebraic & Geometric Topology
Author: Alex Manchester
Institution: Rice University
Language: English
Subfield: Geometry and Topology
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W4413469298