Knotted surfaces in 4-manifolds by Knot surgery and Stabilization

Abstract

Given a simply-connected closed 4-manifold $X$ and a smoothly embedded oriented surface $\Sigma$, various constructions based on Fintushel-Stern knot surgery have produced new surfaces in $X$ that are pairwise homeomorphic to $\Sigma$, but not diffeomorphic. We prove that for all known examples of surface knots constructed from knot surgery operations that preserve the fundamental group of the complement of surface knots, they become pairwise diffeomorphic after stabilizing by connected summing with one $S^2\tilde{\times }{S}^2$. When $X$ is spin, we show in addition that any surfaces obtained by a knot surgery whose complements have cyclic fundamental group become pairwise diffeomorphic after one stabilization by $S^2\tilde{\times }{S}^2$.

20 pages, 10 figures; to appear in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society