Structure in the classical knot concordance group (Q1424241)

This article is the second paper on a filtration of the locally-flat topological knot concordance group via a decreasing sequence of subgroups \({\mathcal F}_0\), \({\mathcal F}_{0.5}\), \({\mathcal F}_1\), \({\mathcal F}_{1.5}\), \({\mathcal F}_2\), \({\mathcal F}_{2.5}\), \({\mathcal F}_3,\cdots\) that are, roughly speaking, determined by vanishing conditions of 4-dimensional ambient surgery obstructions up to depths given by indices. The first subgroups \({\mathcal F}_0\), \({\mathcal F}_{0.5}\), and \({\mathcal F}_{1.5}\) can be described by vanishing conditions of more familiar concordance invariants such as the Arf invariant, Levine's algebraic invariant, and Casson-Gordon invariants, respectively. The main contribution of the article is to show that \({\mathcal F}_2/{\mathcal F}_{2.5}\) is an abelian group of infinite rank and so there are infinitely many independent knots whose concordance invariants mentioned above all vanish. The non-triviality of this quotient was shown in the previous paper by the same authors [Ann. Math. (2) 157, 433--519 (2003; Zbl 1044.57001)] using von Neumann signature. In this paper the authors gain control of the values of the von Neumann signature by obtaining its alternative description via the classical signature function and they also overcome the difficulty of showing its additivity under connected sum by carefully choosing examples. In a subsequent paper, it is shown that \({\mathcal F}_n/{\mathcal F}_{n.5}\) is non-trivial for all \(n\geq 0\). At present, nothing is known about \({\mathcal F}_{n.5}/{\mathcal F}_{n+1}\).