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$% F. González Acuña and H. Short, Cyclic branched coverings of knots and homology spheres, Rev. Mat. Univ. Complut. Madrid 4 (1991), no. 1, 97120.%$

Cyclic Branched Coverings of Knots and Homology Spheres

Francisco GONZÁLEZ ACUÑA and Hamish SHORT
Instituto de Matemáticas
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Department of Mathematics
City College, C.U.N.Y.
Convent Avenue at 138th St.
New York 1003t USA

Received: September 3, 1990
Revised: May 3, 1990
ABSTRACT

We study cyclic coverings of S3  branched over a knot, and study conditions under which the covering is a homology sphere. We show that the sequence of orders of the first homology groups for a given knot is either periodic of tends to infinity with the order of the covering, a result recently obtained independently by Riley. From our computations it follows that, if surgery on a knot k  with less than 10 crossings produces a manifold with cyclic fundamental group, then k  is a torus knot.

1980 Mathematics Subject Classification (1985 revision): 57M12.