No Arabic abstract
We present two practical and widely applicable methods, including some criteria and a general procedure, for detecting Brunnian property of a link, if each component is known to be unknot. The methods are based on observation and handwork. They are used successfully for all Brunnian links known so far. Typical examples and extensive experiments illustrate their efficiency. As an application, infinite families of Brunnian links are created, and we establish a general way to construct new ones in bulk
Twisted torus links are given by twisting a subset of strands on a closed braid representative of a torus link. T--links are a natural generalization, given by repeated positive twisting. We establish a one-to-one correspondence between positive braid representatives of Lorenz links and T--links, so Lorenz links and T--links coincide. Using this correspondence, we identify over half of the simplest hyperbolic knots as Lorenz knots. We show that both hyperbolic volume and the Mahler measure of Jones polynomials are bounded for infinite collections of hyperbolic Lorenz links. The correspondence provides unexpected symmetries for both Lorenz links and T-links, and establishes many new results for T-links, including new braid index formulas.
It is shown that every knot or link is the set of complex tangents of a 3-sphere smoothly embedded in the three-dimensional complex space. We show in fact that a one-dimensional submanifold of a closed orientable 3-manifold can be realised as the set of complex tangents of a smooth embedding of the 3-manifold into the three-dimensional complex space if and only if it represents the trivial integral homology class in the 3-manifold. The proof involves a new application of singularity theory of differentiable maps.
We introduce new topological quantum invariants of compact oriented 3-manifolds with boundary where the boundary is a disjoint union of two identical surfaces. The invariants are constructed via surgery on manifolds of the form $F times I$ where $I$ denotes the unit interval. Since virtual knots and links are represented as links in such thickened surfaces, we are able also to construct invariants in terms of virtual link diagrams (planar diagrams with virtual crossings). These invariants are the first meaningful, nontrivial, and calculable examples of quantum invariants of 3-manifolds with non-vacuous boundary. We give a new invariant of classical links in the 3-sphere in the following sense: Consider a link $L$ in $S^3$ of two components. The complement of a tubular neighborhood of $L$ is a manifold whose boundary consists in two copies of a torus. Our invariants apply to this case of bounded manifold and give new invariants of the given link of two components. Invariants of knots are also obtained.
We prove the meridional rank conjecture for twisted links and arborescent links associated to bipartite trees with even weights. These links are substantial generalizations of pretzels and two-bridge links, respectively. Lower bounds on meridional rank are obtained via Coxeter quotients of the groups of link complements. Matching upper bounds on bridge number are found using the Wirtinger numbers of link diagrams, a combinatorial tool developed by the authors.
We generalize the notion of the quandle polynomial to the case of singquandles. We show that the singquandle polynomial is an invariant of finite singquandles. We also construct a singular link invariant from the singquandle polynomial and show that this new singular link invariant generalizes the singquandle counting invariant. In particular, using the new polynomial invariant, we can distinguish singular links with the same singquandle counting invariant.