Crossing number of an alternating knot and canonical genus of its Whitehead double

Hee Jeong Jang, Sang Youl Lee

Published 2014-09-02Version 1

A conjecture proposed by J. Tripp in 2002 (later modified by T. Nakamura) states that the crossing number of any alternating knot coincides with the canonical genus of its whitehead double. In the meantime, it has been established that this conjecture is true for a large class of alternating knots including $(2, n)$ torus knots, $2$-bridge knots, algebraic alternating knots, and alternating pretzel knots. In this paper, we prove that the conjecture is not true for any alternating $3$-braid knot which is the connected sum of two $(2, n)$-torus knots. This results in a new modified conjecture that the crossing number of any prime alternating knot coincides with the canonical genus of its whitehead double. We give a large class of prime alternating knots satisfying the conjecture, including all prime alternating $3$-braid knots which are not the connected sum of $(2, n)$-torus knots.