2012/04/23 by Jae Choon Cha, Cha, Jae Choon
Mathematics · #57M25 #57M27 #57N70 #Advanced Combinatorial Mathematics #FOS: Mathematics #Geometric Topology (math.GT) #Geometric and Algebraic Topology #Homotopy and Cohomology in Algebraic Topology #math.GT #msc:57M25 #msc:57M27 #msc:57N70
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1204.4968
29 pages, 6 figures; referee's comments incorporated; to appear in Transactions of the AMS
openalex publication_date 2012/04/23 · arxiv created 2012/11/27 · arxiv updated 2012/11/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We introduce a notion of symmetric Whitney tower cobordism between bordered 3-manifolds, aiming at the study of homology cobordism and link concordance. It is motivated by the symmetric Whitney tower approach to slicing knots and links initiated by Cochran, Orr, and Teichner. We give amenable Cheeger-Gromov rho-invariant obstructions to bordered 3-manifolds being Whitney tower cobordant. Our obstruction is related to and generalizes several prior known results, and also gives new interesting cases. As an application, our method applied to link exteriors reveals new structures on (Whitney tower and grope) concordance between links with nonzero linking number, including the Hopf link.