Related papers: Positive knots have negative signature
If a knot is a nontrivial connected sum of positive torus knots, then it is not concordant to an L-space knot.
Knots in Euclidean space which may be parameterized by a single cosine function in each coordinate are called Lissajous knots. We show that twist knots are Lissajous knots if and only if their Arf invariants are zero. We further prove that…
We prove that a family of links, which includes all special alternating knots, does not admit non-nugatory crossing changes which preserve the isotopy type of the link. Our proof incorporates a result of Lidman and Moore on crossing changes…
We show that for the pretzel knots $K_k=P(3,-3,-2k-1)$, the $n$-fold cyclic branched covers are L-spaces for all $n\geq 1$. In addition, we show that the knots $K_k$ with $k\geq 1$ are quasipositive and slice, answering a question of…
The first and last named authors have demonstrated the existence of knots for which every integral slope is non-characterizing. In this short note, we extend this result in two ways. There exists a knot that shares for every integer n the…
We study "positive" graphs that have a nonnegative homomorphism number into every edge-weighted graph (where the edgeweights may be negative). We conjecture that all positive graphs can be obtained by taking two copies of an arbitrary…
The paper develops a general theory of orderability of quandles with a focus on link quandles of tame links and gives some general constructions of orderable quandles. We prove that knot quandles of many fibered prime knots are…
We prove that many pretzel knots of the form $P(2n,m,-2n\pm1,-m)$ are not topologically slice, even though their positive mutants $P(2n, -2n\pm1, m, -m)$ are ribbon. We use the sliceness obstruction of Kirk and Livingston related to the…
In this paper, we study Legendrian realizations of cable links of knot types that are uniformly thick but not Legendrian simple, extending prior work of Dalton, the second author, and Traynor. This leads to new phenomena, such as stabilized…
Several classical knot invariants, such as the Alexander polynomial, the Levine-Tristram signature and the Blanchfield pairing, admit natural extensions from knots to links, and more generally, from oriented links to so-called colored…
A large class of positive finite presentations of the braid groups is found and studied. It is shown that no presentations but known exceptions in this class have the property that equivalent braid words are also equivalent under positive…
Motivated by an observation of Dehornoy, we study the roots of Alexander polynomials of knots and links that are closures of positive 3-strand braids. We give experimental data on random such braids and find that the roots exhibit marked…
If there are any 2-component counterexamples to the Generalized Property R Conjecture, a least genus component of all such counterexamples cannot be a fibered knot. Furthermore, the monodromy of a fibered component of any such…
We prove that if a knot $K$ has a particular type of diagram then all non-trivial surgeries on $K$ contain a coorientable taut foliation. Knots admitting such diagrams include many two-bridge knots, many pretzel knots, many Montesinos knots…
It is found that the number, $M_n$, of irreducible multiple zeta values (MZVs) of weight $n$, is generated by $1-x^2-x^3=\prod_n (1-x^n)^{M_n}$. For $9\ge n\ge3$, $M_n$ enumerates positive knots with $n$ crossings. Positive knots to which…
Given a band sum of a split two-component link along a nontrivial band, we obtain a family of knots indexed by the integers by adding any number of full twists to the band. We show that the knots in this family have the same Heegaard knot…
We classify positive transversal torus knots in tight contact structures up to transversal isotopy.
It is known that connected sums of positive torus knots are not concordant to $L$-space knots. Here we consider differences of torus knots. The main result states that the subgroup of the concordance group generated by two positive torus…
We give an infinite family of knots that are not rationally concordant to their reverses. More precisely, if R denotes the involution of the rational knot concordance group QC induced by string reversal and Fix(R) denotes the subgroup of…
For each $g>0$ we give infinitely many knots that are strongly negative amphichiral, hence rationally slice and representing 2-torsion in the smooth concordance group, yet which do not bound any locally flatly embedded surface in the 4-ball…