A Note on Pure Braids and Link Concordance

Abstract

The knot concordance group can be contextualized as organizing problems about 3- and 4-dimensional spaces and the relationships between them. Every 3-manifold is surgery on some link, not necessarily a knot, and thus it is natural to ask about such a group for links. In 1988, Le Dimet constructed the string link concordance groups and in 1998, Habegger and Lin precisely characterized these groups as quotients of the link concordance sets using a group action. Notably, the knot concordance group is abelian while, for each $n$, the string link concordance group on $n$ strands is non-abelian as it contains the pure braid group on $n$ strands as a subgroup. In this work, we prove that even the quotient of each string link concordance group by its pure braid subgroup is non-abelian.