No Arabic abstract
In the 1950s Milnor defined a family of higher order invariants generalizing the linking number. Even the first of these new invariants, the triple linking number, has received and fruitful study since its inception. In the case that $L$ has vanishing pairwise linking numbers, this triple linking number gives an integer valued invariant. When the linking numbers fail to vanish, this invariant is only well-defined modulo their greatest common divisor. In recent work Davis-Nagel-Orson-Powell produce a single invariant called the total triple linking number refining the triple linking number and taking values in an abelian group called the total Milnor quotient. They present examples for which this quotient is nontrivial even though none of the individual triple linking numbers are defined. As a consequence, the total triple linking number carries more information than do the classical triple linking numbers. The goal of the present paper is to compute this group and show that when $L$ is a link of at least six components it is non-trivial. Thus, this total triple linking number carries information for every $(nge 6)$-component link, even though the classical triple linking numbers often carry no information.
We give a refined value group for the collection of triple linking numbers of links in the 3-sphere. Given two links with the same pairwise linking numbers we show that they have the same refined triple linking number collection if and only if the links admit homeomorphic surface systems. Moreover these two conditions hold if and only if the link exteriors are bordant over $B mathbb{Z}^n$, and if and only if the third lower central series quotients $pi/pi_3$ of the link groups are isomorphic preserving meridians and longitudes. We also show that these conditions imply that the link groups have isomorphic fourth lower central series quotients $pi/pi_4$, preserving meridians.
Every link in the 3-sphere has a projection to the plane where the only singularities are pairwise transverse triple points. The associated diagram, with height information at each triple point, is a triple-crossing diagram of the link. We give a set of diagrammatic moves on triple-crossing diagrams analogous to the Reidemeister moves on ordinary diagrams. The existence of n-crossing diagrams for every n>1 allows the definition of the n-crossing number. We prove that for any nontrivial, nonsplit link, other than the Hopf link, its triple-crossing number is strictly greater than its quintuple-crossing number.
We establish some new relationships between Milnor invariants and Heegaard Floer homology. This includes a formula for the Milnor triple linking number from the link Floer complex, detection results for the Whitehead link and Borromean rings, and a structural property of the $d$-invariants of surgeries on certain algebraically split links.
A handlebody-link is a disjoint union of embeddings of handlebodies in $S^3$ and an HL-homotopy is an equivalence relation on handlebody-links generated by self-crossing changes. The second author and Ryo Nikkuni classified the set of HL-homotopy classes of 2-component handlebody-links completely using the linking numbers for handlebody-links. In this paper, we construct a family of invariants for HL-homotopy classes of general handlebody-links, by using Milnors link-homotopy invariants. Moreover, we give a bijection between the set of HL-homotopy classes of almost trivial handlebody-links and tensor product space modulo some general linear actions, especially for 3- or more component handlebody-links. Through this bijection we construct comparable invariants of HL-homotopy classes.
Conway and Gordon proved that for every spatial complete graph on six vertices, the sum of the linking numbers over all of the constituent two-component links is odd, and Kazakov and Korablev proved that for every spatial complete graph with arbitrary number of vertices greater than six, the sum of the linking numbers over all of the constituent two-component Hamiltonian links is even. In this paper, we show that for every spatial complete graph whose number of vertices is greater than six, the sum of the square of the linking numbers over all of the two-component Hamiltonian links is determined explicitly in terms of the sum over all of the triangle-triangle constituent links. As an application, we show that if the number of vertices is sufficiently large then every spatial complete graph contains a two-component Hamiltonian link whose absolute value of the linking number is arbitrary large. Some applications to rectilinear spatial complete graphs are also given.