w-Invariants and the Fintushel–Stern Invariants for Plumbed Homology 3-Spheres

Abstract

In this paper, we present numerical computations of the winvariants and the Fintushel–Stern invariants for plumbed homology 3-spheres and use the results to test a conjecture of Witten suggesting that the invariants carry equivalent information. While the two invariants give nearly the same information for some homology 3-spheres, we present numerous examples in which the information carried by the two invariants is quite different.