Signatures of links in rational homology spheres (Q1849800)

Signature invariants of knots and links have been studied in many articles. They are known to be concordance invariants of codimension two knots and links in odd dimensional spheres. In this paper, signature invariants, called signature jump functions, are developed for codimension two links in rational homology spheres and they are shown to be invariant under rational homology concordance. Two \(n\)-links \((\Sigma_0,L_0)\) and \((\Sigma_1,L_1)\) in rational homology \((n+2)\)-spheres are rational homology cobordant if there is a \((n+3)\)-manifold \(S\) whose boundary is the disjoint union of \(-\Sigma_0\) and \(\Sigma_1\) such that \((S,\Sigma_0,\Sigma_1)\) has the rational homology of \((S^{n+2}\times [0,1],S^ {n+2}\times 0,S^{n+2}\times 1)\), and there is a proper submanifold \(L\) in \(S\) diffeomorphic to \(L_0\times [0,1]\) such that the boundary of the \(i\)th component of \(L\) is the union of the \(i\)th components of \(-L_0\) and \(L_1\). This notion is a natural generalization of the usual concordance. The signature jump function is defined by using a generalized Seifert surface for a link, and several nice properties are established. Then the authors show the existence of infinitely many knots in rational homology spheres whose signature jump functions do not have a certain property satisfied by knots in integral homology spheres. Hence such knots are not rational homology concordant to knots in spheres. This illustrates that the rational homology concordance theory of links in rational homology spheres is not reduced to that of links in spheres.