Universal Surgery Problems with Trivial Lagrangian

Abstract

We study the effect of Nielsen moves and their geometric counterparts, handle slides, on good boundary links. A collection of links, universal for 4-dimensional surgery, is shown to admit Seifert surfaces with trivial Lagrangian. They are good boundary links, with Seifert matrices of a more general form than in known constructions of slice links. We show that a certain more restrictive condition on Seifert matrices is sufficient for proving the links are slice. We also give a correction of a Kirby calculus identity in \cite{FK2}, useful for constructing surgery kernels associated to link-slice problems.