Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2021

Published In

Algebraic And Geometric Topology

Abstract

Prime power–fold cyclic branched covers along smoothly slice knots all bound rational homology balls. This phenomenon, however, does not characterize slice knots. We give a new construction of nonslice knots that have the above property. The sliceness obstruction comes from computing twisted Alexander polynomials, and we introduce new techniques to simplify their calculation.

Keywords

knot concordance group, branched covers

Comments

This work is a preprint that is freely available from arXiv.org at arXiv:2002.10324, courtesy of Mathematical Sciences Publishers.

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Mathematics Commons

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