Hassett, Brendan2016-01-272016-01-272015-052015-04-23May 2015Vela, Diego. "Infection By A String Link." (2015) Diss., Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/88181">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/88181</a>.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/88181Satellite constructions on a knot can be thought of as taking some strands of a knot and then tying in another knot. Using satellite constructions one can construct many distinct isotopy classes of knots. Pushing this further one can construct distinct concordance classes of knots which preserve some algebraic invariants. Infection is a generalization of satellite operations which has been previously studied. An infection by a string link can be thought of as grabbing a knot at multiple locations and then tying in a link. Cochran, Friedl and Teichner showed that any algebraically slice knot is the result of infecting a slice knot by a string link(1). In this paper we use the infection construction to show that there exist knots which arise from infections by n-component string links that cannot be obtained by (n − 1)-component string links.application/pdfengCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.KnotLinkString LinkToplologyLow Dimensional TopologyString Link InfectionConcordanceKnot ConcordanceThesis2016-01-27