Vassiliev invariants of two component links and the Casson-Walker invariant (Q1360150)

The authors consider the Vassiliev type invariant for a two disjoint components link. This ``disjoint'' means that a linking number is fixed and the Vassiliev skein relation can be used only for the crossing points on the same component. This setting is very different from the usual one and very complicated. The authors consider the Casson-Walker invariant of the three-manifold that is obtained from 0-surgery on a two-component link \(L\) in \(S^3\) and modified it valued at the integer, denoted by \(\lambda (L)\). They show that the type 1 integer Vassiliev invariant for a two-disjoint-components link modulo the type 0 is only the modified Casson-Walker invariant \(\lambda (L)\). It is also shown that \(\lambda (L)\) has a simple combinatorial definition, making it easy to compute, and as an application they give a quick proof that amphicheiral links cannot have linking number equal to 2 modulo 4.