Links with trivial Alexander's module but non-vanishing Massey products (Q919666)

The author uses his geometric techniques introduced in ``Derivatives of links: Milnor's concordance invariants and Massey's products'' [Mem. Am. Math. Soc. 427 (1990)] to produce many examples of links in \(S^ 3\) with trivial Alexander modules but nontrivial Milnor \({\bar \mu}\)-invariants. The existence of such examples indicates that the Alexander module is less sensitive to topological properties of links than may previously have been suspected; in particular, for some of these links the module does not detect the fact that they are nontrivial even under homotopy, one of the coarsest equivalence relations in link theory.