The signature of a splice

Alex Degtyarev, Vincent Florens, Ana G. Lecuona

Published 2014-09-20Version 1

We consider the signature of a colored link in an integral homology sphere and study its behavior under the splice operation. We show that the signature is almost additive, with a correction term independent of the links. We interpret this correction term as the signature of a generalized Hopf link and give a simple closed formula to compute it.