Casson towers and slice links

Abstract

We prove that a Casson tower of height 4 contains a flat embedded disc bounded by the attaching circle, and we prove disc embedding results for height 2 and 3 Casson towers which are embedded into a 4-manifold, with some additional fundamental group assumptions. In the proofs we create a capped grope from a Casson tower and use a refined height raising argument to establish the existence of a symmetric grope which has two layers of caps, data which is sufficient for a topological disc to exist, with the desired boundary. As applications, we present new slice knots and links by giving direct geometric constructions of slicing discs. In particular we construct a family of slice knots which are potential counterexamples to the homotopy ribbon slice conjecture.