English

Intrinsic linking and knotting in tournaments

Geometric Topology 2019-01-14 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

A directed graph GG is intrinsically linked\textit{intrinsically linked} if every embedding of that graph contains a non-split link LL, where each component of LL is a consistently oriented cycle in GG. A tournament\textit{tournament} is a directed graph where each pair of vertices is connected by exactly one directed edge. We consider intrinsic linking and knotting in tournaments, and study the minimum number of vertices required for a tournament to have various intrinsic linking or knotting properties. We produce the following bounds: intrinsically linked (n=8n=8), intrinsically knotted (9n129 \leq n \leq 12), intrinsically 3-linked (10n2310 \leq n \leq 23), intrinsically 4-linked (12n6612 \leq n \leq 66), intrinsically 5-linked (15n15415 \leq n \leq 154), intrinsically mm-linked (3mn8(2m3)23m \leq n \leq 8(2m-3)^2), intrinsically linked with knotted components (9n1079 \leq n \leq 107), and the disjoint linking property (12n1412 \leq n \leq 14). We also introduce the consistency gap\textit{consistency gap}, which measures the difference in the order of a graph required for intrinsic nn-linking in tournaments versus undirected graphs. We conjecture the consistency gap to be non-decreasing in nn, and provide an upper bound at each nn.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1901.03451,
  title  = {Intrinsic linking and knotting in tournaments},
  author = {Thomas Fleming and Joel Foisy},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.03451},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

16 pages, 4 figures