Rank-expanding satellites, Whitehead doubles, and Heegaard Floer homology

Abstract

We show that a large class of satellite operators are rank-expanding; that is, they map some rank-one subgroup of the concordance group onto an infinite linearly independent set. Our work constitutes the first systematic study of this property in the literature and partially affirms a conjecture of the second author and Pinzón-Caicedo. More generally, we establish a Floer-theoretic condition for a family of companion knots to have infinite-rank image under satellites from this class. The methods we use are amenable to patterns that act trivially in topological concordance and are capable of handling a surprisingly wide variety of companions. For instance, we give an infinite linearly independent family of Whitehead doubles whose companion knots all have negative $\tau$-invariant. Our results also recover and extend several theorems in this area established using instanton Floer homology.