ON LINKING SIGNATURE INVARIANTS OF SURFACE-KNOTS

Abstract

We show that the linking signature of a closed oriented 4-manifold with infinite cyclic first homology is twice the Rochlin invariant of an exact leaf with a spin support if such a leaf exists. In particular, the linking signature of a surface-knot in the 4-sphere is twice the Rochlin invariant of an exact leaf of an associated closed spin 4-manifold with infinite cyclic first homology. As an application, we characterize a difference between the spin structures on a homology quaternion space in terms of closed oriented 4-manifolds with infinite cyclic first homology, so that we can obtain examples showing that some different punctured embeddings into S4 produce different Rochlin invariants for some homology quaternion spaces.