Salem-Boyd sequences and Hopf plumbing (Q854528)

Given a fibered link, the generalized Alexander polynomial is defined as the characteristic polynomial of the monodromy restricted to the first homology. The author defines a construction, called iterated plumbing, to create a sequence of fibered links from a given one, and shows that the resulting sequence of the generalized Alexander polynomials for these links has the same form as those arising in work of Salem and Boyd in their study of distributions of Salem and P-V numbers. From this the author derives information about the asymptotic behavior of the large roots and the Mahler measure of the generalized Alexander polynomials, and defines a new poset structure for Salem fibered links.