Instantons, concordance, and whitehead doubling

Abstract

We use moduli spaces of instantons and Chern-Simons invariants of flat connections to prove that the Whitehead doubles of (2, 2n − 1) torus knots are independent in the smooth knot concordance group; that is, they freely generate a subgroup of infinite rank. © 2012 Journal of Differential Geometry. © 2012 Applied Probability Trust.