We establish homotopy ribbon concordance obstructions coming from the Blanchfield form and Levine–Tristram signatures. Then, as an application of twisted Alexander polynomials, we show that for every knot K with nontrivial Alexander polynomial, there exists an infinite family of knots that are all concordant to K and have the same Blanchfield form as K, such that no pair of knots in that family is homotopy ribbon concordant.

We define and study twisted Alexander-type invariants of complex hypersurface complements. We investigate torsion properties for the twisted Alexander modules and extend the local-to-global divisibility results of Maxim and of Dimca and Libgober to the twisted setting. In the process, we also study the splitting fields containing the roots of the corresponding twisted Alexander polynomials.

The Burau representation of the braid group can be used to recover the Alexander polynomial of the closure of a braid. We define twisted Burau maps and use them to compute twisted Alexander polynomials.

It follows from earlier work of Silver and Williams and the authors that twisted Alexander polynomials detect the unknot and the Hopf link. We now show that twisted Alexander polynomials also detect the trefoil and the figure-8 knot, that twisted Alexander polynomials detect whether a link is split and that twisted Alexander modules detect trivial links. We use this result to provide algorithms for detecting whether a link is the unlink, whether it is split, and whether it is totally split.