Isotopies of surfaces in 4–manifolds via banded unlink diagrams

Abstract

In this paper, we study surfaces embedded in $4$-manifolds. We give a complete set of moves relating banded unlink diagrams of isotopic surfaces in an arbitrary $4$-manifold. This extends work of Swenton and Kearton-Kurlin in $S^4$. As an application, we show that bridge trisections of isotopic surfaces in a trisected $4$-manifold are related by a sequence of perturbations and deperturbations, affirmatively proving a conjecture of Meier and Zupan. We also exhibit several isotopies of unit surfaces in $\mathbb{C}P^2$ (i.e. spheres in the generating homology class), proving that many explicit unit surfaces are isotopic to the standard $\mathbb{C}P^1$. This strengthens some previously known results about the Gluck twist in $S^4$, related to Kirby problem 4.23.