Normal forms of 2-plat 2-knots and their Alexander polynomials

A 2-knot is a 2-sphere smoothly embedded in the 4-space. A 2-knot is called n-plat if it is equivalent to the plat closure of a 2-dimensional $2n$-braid, which is a higher-dimensional analogue of an n-bridge knot. Every 1-plat 2-knot is trivial, and there exist infinitely many nontrivial 2-plat 2-knots. In this paper, we introduce normal forms of 2-plat 2-knots using rational numbers. We compute their knot groups and Alexander polynomials based on these normal forms. We also propose conjectures on a classification of 2-plat 2-knots and their Alexander polynomials. Computer calculations confirm these conjectures for 2-plat 2-knots with denominators up to 2000.