Research reveals non-isotopic Seifert surfaces for a knot in S^3, suggesting important properties in topology and homology.
We answer a question of Livingston from 1982 by producing Seifert surfaces of the same genus for a knot in S³ that do not become isotopic when their interiors are pushed into B⁴ . In particular, we identify examples where the surfaces are not even topologically isotopic in B⁴ , examples that are topologically but not smoothly isotopic, and examples of infinite families of surfaces that are distinct only up to isotopy rel. boundary. Our main proofs distinguish surfaces using the cobordism maps on Khovanov homology, and our calculations demonstrate the stability and computability of these maps under certain satellite operations.
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Hayden et al. (2025) studied this question.
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