Abstract
Casson defined an invariant which can be thought of as the number of conjugacy classes of irreducible representations of π1(Y) into SU(2) counted with signs, where Y is an oriented integral homology 3-sphere. Lin defined a similar invariant (the signature of a knot) for a braid representative of a knot in S3. In this paper, we give a natural generalization of Casson-Lin's invariant. Our invariant is the symplectic Floer homology for the representation space of π1(S3 \ K) into SU(2) with trace-zero along all meridians. The symplectic Floer homology of braids is a new invariant of knots and its Euler number is the negative of Casson-Lin's invariant.
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