On the slice-ribbon conjecture for pretzel knots

Abstract

We give a necessary, and in some cases sufficient, condition for sliceness inside the family of pretzel knots $P (p_1,...,p_n)$ with one $p_i$ even. The three stranded case yields two interesting families of examples: the first consists of knots for which the non-sliceness is detected by the Alexander polynomial while several modern obstructions to sliceness vanish. The second family has the property that the correction terms from Heegaard-Floer homology of the double branched covers of these knots do not obstruct the existence of a rational homology ball; however, the Casson-Gordon invariants show that the double branched covers do not bound rational homology balls.