Cosmetic surgery and the $SL(2,\mathbb{C})$ Casson invariant for two-bridge knots

Abstract

We consider the cosmetic surgery problem for two-bridge knots in the 3-sphere. We first verify by using previously known results that all the two-bridge knots of at most $9$ crossings admit no purely cosmetic surgery pairs except for the knot $9_{27}$. Then we show that any two-bridge knot corresponding to the continued fraction $[0, 2x, 2, -2x, 2x, 2, -2x]$ for a positive integer $x$ admits no cosmetic surgery pairs yielding homology 3-spheres, where $9_{27}$ appears when $x = 1$. Our advantage to prove this is using the $SL(2,\mathbb{C})$ Casson invariant.