Concordance of Bing doubles and boundary genus

Abstract

Cha and Kim proved that if a knot K is not algebraically slice, then no iterated Bing double of K is concordant to the unlink. We prove that if K has nontrivial signature $\sigma$, then the n-iterated Bing double of K is not concordant to any boundary link with boundary surfaces of genus less than $2^{n-1}\sigma$. The same result holds with $\sigma$ replaced by $2\tau$, twice the Ozsvath-Szabo knot concordance invariant.