Combinatorial cusp count and clover invariants

Abstract

We construct efficient topological cobordisms between torus links and large connected sums of trefoil knots. As an application, we show that the signature invariant $\ddot{I}{ƒ}_{\ddot{I}}‰$ at $\ddot{I}‰=\hat{I}{\P }_6$ takes essentially minimal values on torus links among all concordance homomorphisms with the same normalisation on the trefoil knot.

10 pages, 2 figures, comments welcome!