Department of Mathematics and Research Institute for Basic Sciences, Kyung Hee University, Seoul 130--701, Korea ; Department of Mathematics, Konkuk University, Seoul 143--701, Korea
Abstract:
We show that if the connected sum of two knots with coprime Alexander polynomials has vanishing von Neumann -invariants associated with certain metabelian representations, then so do both knots. As an application, we give a new example of an infinite family of knots which are linearly independent in the knot concordance group.