Chirally cosmetic surgeries and Casson invariants (Q1984012)

Given a knot \(K\) in an orientable 3-manifold \(M\), two distinct Dehn surgeries on \(K\) are ``chirally cosmetic'' if they result in 3-manifolds that are homeomorphic via an orientation reversing homeomorphism. Amphicheiral knots have chirally cosmetic surgeries, as do \((2,n)\)-torus knots in \(S^3\). This paper uses the Casson-Walker invariant and the Casson-Gordon invariant to provide obstructions to the existence of chirally cosmetic surgeries on knots in homology spheres. In the situation where \(K\) is a knot in the 3-sphere which has Dehn surgeries of distinct slopes producing manifolds that are orientation-reversingly homeomorphic, the authors give a large collection of results relating the surgery coefficients, the signature, the Jones polynomial, and the Alexander polynomial of the knot. They show that certain knots produced by sufficiently many ``linking number non-zero'' twists on another knot do not have chirally cosmetic surgeries. The theorem having the most elegant statement is: Theorem 6.4. Let \(K\) be an alternating knot of genus one. For distinct slopes \(r\) and \(r'\), if the \(r\) and \(r'\) surgeries on \(K\) are chirally cosmetic, then either: \begin{itemize} \item[(i)] \(K\) is amphicheiral and \(r = -r'\), or \item[(ii)] \(K\) is the right handed trefoil and \(\{r, r'\} = \{(18k+9)/(3k + 1), (18k + 9)/(3k+2)\}\) or \(K\) is the left handed trefoil and \(\{r, r'\} = \{- (18k+9)/(3k+1), -(18k+9)/(3k+2)\}\) for some integer \(k\). \end{itemize}