We define a grid presentation for singular links i.e. links with a finite number of rigid transverse double points. Then we use it to generalize link Floer homology to singular links. Besides the consistency of its definition, we prove that this homo
logy is acyclic under some conditions which naturally make its Euler characteristic vanish.
This note investigates the so-called Tube map which connects welded knots, that is a quotient of the virtual knot theory, to ribbon torus-knots, that is a restricted notion of fillable knotted tori in the 4-sphere. It emphasizes the fact that ribbon
torus-knots with a given filling are in one-to-one correspondence with welded knots before quotient under classical Reidemeister moves and reformulates these moves and the known sources of non-injectivity of the Tube map in terms of filling changes.
Ribbon 2-knotted objects are locally flat embeddings of surfaces in 4-space which bound immersed 3-manifolds with only ribbon singularities. They appear as topological realizations of welded knotted objects, which is a natural quotient of virtual kno
t theory. In this paper we consider ribbon tubes and ribbon torus-links, which are natural analogues of string links and links, respectively. We show how ribbon tubes naturally act on the reduced free group, and how this action classifies ribbon tubes up to link-homotopy, that is when allowing each component to cross itself. At the combinatorial level, this provides a classification of welded string links up to self-virtualization. This generalizes a result of Habegger and Lin on usual string links, and the above-mentioned action on the reduced free group can be refined to a general virtual extension of Milnor invariants. As an application, we obtain a classification of ribbon torus-links up to link-homotopy.
