The fusion number of a ribbon knot is the minimal number of 1-handles needed to construct a ribbon disk. The strong homotopy fusion number of a ribbon knot is the minimal number of 2-handles in a handle decomposition of a ribbon disk complement. We demonstrate that these invariants behave completely differently under cabling by showing that the (p,1)-cable of any ribbon knot with fusion number one has strong homotopy fusion number one and fusion number p. Our main tools are Juhasz-Miller-Zemkes bound on fusion number coming from the torsion order of knot Floer homology and Hanselman-Watsons cabling formula for immersed curves.
Conway-normalized Alexander polynomial of ribbon knots depend only on their ribbon diagrams. Here ribbon diagram means a ribbon spanning the ribbon knot marked with the information of singularities. We further give an algorithm to calculate Alexander
polynomials of ribbon knots from their ribbon diagrams.
We study Kauffmans model of folded ribbon knots: knots made of a thin strip of paper folded flat in the plane. The folded ribbonlength is the length to width ratio of such a ribbon knot. We give upper bounds on the folded ribbonlength of 2-bridge, $(
2,p)$ torus, twist, and pretzel knots, and these upper bounds turn out to be linear in crossing number. We give a new way to fold $(p,q)$ torus knots, and show that their folded ribbonlength is bounded above by $p+q$. This means, for example, that the trefoil knot can be constructed with a folded ribbonlength of 5. We then show that any $(p,q)$ torus knot $K$ has a constant $c>0$, such that the folded ribbonlength is bounded above by $ccdot Cr(K)^{1/2}$, providing an example of an upper bound on folded ribbonlength that is sub-linear in crossing number.
We prove that a crossing change along a double point circle on a 2-knot is realized by ribbon-moves for a knotted torus obtained from the 2-knot by attaching a 1-handle. It follows that any 2-knots for which the crossing change is an unknotting opera
tion, such as ribbon 2-knots and twist-spun knots, have trivial Khovanov-Jacobsson number.
We prove a cabling formula for the concordance invariant $ u^+$, defined by the author and Hom. This gives rise to a simple and effective 4-ball genus bound for many cable knots.
Let $M$ be a simple 3-manifold, and $F$ be a component of $partial M$ of genus at least 2. Let $alpha$ and $beta$ be separating slopes on $F$. Let $M(alpha)$ (resp. $M(beta)$) be the manifold obtained by adding a 2-handle along $alpha$ (resp. $beta$)
. If $M(alpha)$ and $M(beta)$ are $partial$-reducible, then the minimal geometric intersection number of $alpha$ and $beta$ is at most 8.