Ribbon knots and iterated cables of fibered knots

Abstract

We define a knot to be $\gamma_0$-sharp if its Seifert genus is detected by the concordance invariant $\gamma_0$, which arises from the immersed curve formalism in bordered Heegaard Floer homology. We show that a connected sum of $\gamma_0$-sharp fibered knots is ribbon exactly when it is of the form $K \mathbin{\#} -K$. Consequently, either iterated cables of tight fibered knots are linearly independent in the smooth concordance group, or the slice--ribbon conjecture fails.