Spanning solids and Murasugi sum in dimension four

Abstract

We study various constructions of spanning solids for knotted surfaces in the 4-sphere. In particular, we consider a 4-dimensional analogue of Murasugi sum, which we use to define a notion of arborescent knotted surfaces. We give a variety of examples and applications to broken surface diagrams, such as deciding which resolutions of the crossings in these diagrams yield spanning solids.