Ribbon concordances and slice obstructions: experiments and examples

Abstract

There are 352.2 million prime knots in the 3-sphere with at most 19 crossings. We study which of these knots are slice, in both the smooth and topological categories. While no algorithm is known for deciding whether a given knot is slice in either setting, we are able to determine it smoothly for all but about 11,400 knots (0.003% or 1 in 30,000) and topologically for all but about 1,400 knots (0.0004% or about 1 in 250,000). In particular, we show that some 1.6 million of these knots (0.46%) are smoothly slice (in fact ribbon) and that 350.5 million are not even topologically slice (99.54%). We use a wide range of tools and techniques, and introduce several new or refined methods for probing these properties. Along the way, we produce 500,000 pairs of 0-friends, that is, pairs of distinct knots with the same 0-surgery. We discuss how our data is consistent with several important conjectures and suggests new ones, and highlight the simplest knots where sliceness remains unknown.