English

Asymptotic laws for random knot diagrams

Geometric Topology 2017-05-24 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

We study random knotting by considering knot and link diagrams as decorated, (rooted) topological maps on spheres and pulling them uniformly from among sets of a given number of vertices nn, as first established in recent work with Cantarella and Mastin. The knot diagram model is an exciting new model which captures both the random geometry of space curve models of knotting as well as the ease of computing invariants from diagrams. We prove that unknot diagrams are asymptotically exponentially rare, an analogue of Sumners and Whittington's landmark result for self-avoiding walks. Our proof uses the same key idea: We first show that knot diagrams obey a pattern theorem, which describes their fractal structure. We examine how quickly this behavior occurs in practice. As a consequence, almost all diagrams are asymmetric, simplifying sampling from this model. We conclude with experimental data on knotting in this model. This model of random knotting is similar to those studied by Diao et al., and Dunfield et al.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1608.02638,
  title  = {Asymptotic laws for random knot diagrams},
  author = {Harrison Chapman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.02638},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

25 pages, 22 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T15:15:26.215Z