Links not concordant to the Hopf link

Mark Powell

Analogously to Freedman's result for knots, Jim Davis proved that a two component link with multi-variable Alexander polynomial one is concordant to the Hopf link. It turns out that the theory of concordance to the Hopf link bears many more formal similarities to the theory of knot concordance.
In joint work with Stefan Friedl, we employ Casson-Gordon type representations to find new obstructions to two component links of linking number one being concordant to the Hopf link.