Crossing distances of surface-knots

Abstract

A surface-knot is an embedded closed connected oriented surface in 4-space. A surface diagram is a projection of a surface-knot into 3-space with crossing information. In this paper we define a distance from a special surface diagram to a trivial diagram as the minimal number of special double cycles, where we can change the crossing information to obtain the trivial diagram. We estimate the distance using the number of 1-handles needed to obtain a trivial diagram.