Knot concordance and von Neumann \(\rho\)-invariants (Q879624)

The classical knot concordance group has two geometrically defined filtrations, the ``grope filtration'' and the ``Whitney filtration''. (Roughly speaking, a grope is a subcomplex of \(S^4\) which is a finite tower of embedded surfaces, whereas a Whitney tower is a finite tower of immersed discs in \(S^4\).) The main result of this paper is that these filtrations are non-trivial at every level; the successive subquotients have elements of infinite order. (It is not yet known whether these subquotients all have infinite rank, nor whether the filtrations are convergent to 0.) The construction of examples realizing such elements uses the technique of ``genetic infection'', while the obstructions showing that the examples are non-trivial are based on \(L^2\) analogues of the \(\rho\)-invariant. The paper is written so that it may be read independently of earlier papers on this theme by the authors and their coworkers.