Embedding spheres in knot traces

The trace of the n-framed surgery on a knot in S3 is a 4-manifold homotopy equivalent to the 2-sphere. We characterise when a generator of the second homotopy group of such a manifold can be realised by a locally flat embedded 2-sphere whose complement has abelian fundamental group. Our characterisation is in terms of classical and computable 3-dimensional knot invariants. For each n, this provides conditions that imply a knot is topologically n-shake slice, directly analogous to the result of Freedman and Quinn that a knot with trivial Alexander polynomial is topologically slice