English

Intrinsic linking and knotting are arbitrarily complex in directed graphs

Geometric Topology 2019-01-07 v1

Abstract

Fleming and Foisy recently proved the existence of a digraph whose every embedding contains a 44-component link, and left open the possibility that a directed graph with an intrinsic nn-component link might exist. We show that, indeed, this is the case. In fact, much as Flapan, Mellor, and Naimi show for graphs, knotting and linking are arbitrarily complex in directed graphs. Specifically, we prove the analog for digraphs of the main theorem of their paper: for any nn and α\alpha, every embedding of a sufficiently large complete digraph in R3\mathbb{R}^3 contains an oriented link with components Q1,,QnQ_1, \ldots, Q_n such that, for every iji \neq j, lk(Qi,Qj)α|\mathrm{lk}(Q_i,Q_j)| \geq \alpha and a2(Qi)α|a_2(Q_i)| \geq \alpha, where a2(Qi)a_2(Q_i) denotes the second coefficient of the Conway polynomial of QiQ_i.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1901.01212,
  title  = {Intrinsic linking and knotting are arbitrarily complex in directed graphs},
  author = {Thomas W. Mattman and Ramin Naimi and Benjamin Pagano},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.01212},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

9 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:03:22.425Z