The Casson invariant of surgered, sewn link exteriors (Q1191869)

The sewing up construction of W. R. Brakes produces a closed 3-manifold by identifying the boundary components of the exterior of a 2-component link. As explained in the author's abstract: ``Under certain assumptions this process yields homology handles which can be surgered to obtain homology spheres. The main result is a formula for the Casson invariant of homology spheres obtained by this construction when the link has linking number zero. The main ingredient is a lemma which relates some information from the Conway polynomial of the band connected sum of two knots before and after the surgery''.