Ribbon concordance and fibered predecessors

Abstract

Given any knot K in the 3-sphere, we prove that there are only finitely many hyperbolic fibered knots which are ribbon concordant to K. It follows that every fibered knot in the 3-sphere has only finitely many hyperbolic predecessors under ribbon concordance. Our proof combines results about maps on Floer homology induced by ribbon cobordisms with a relationship between the knot Floer homology of a fibered knot and fixed points of its monodromy. We then use the same techniques in combination with results of Cornish and Kojima-McShane to prove an inequality relating the volumes of ribbon concordant hyperbolic fibered knots.