Related papers: Bridge and pants complexities of knots
We present a topological interpretation of knot and braid contact homology in degree zero, in terms of cords and skein relations. This interpretation allows us to extend the knot invariant to embedded graphs and higher-dimensional knots. We…
We define "fat" train tracks and use them to give a combinatorial criterion for the Hempel distance of Heegaard splittings for closed orientable 3-manifolds. We apply this criterion to 3-manifolds obtained from surgery on knots in the three…
We show that a two-bridge ribbon knot $K(m^2 , m k \pm 1)$ with $m > k >0$ and $(m,k)=1$ admits a symmetric union presentation with partial knot which is a two-bridge knot $K(m,k)$. Similar descriptions for all the other two-bridge ribbon…
Let M be a closed 3-manifold with a given Heegaard splitting. We show that after a single stabilization, some core of the stabilized splitting has arbitrarily high distance with respect to the splitting surface. This generalizes a result of…
We introduce and study bridge decompositions for 3-manifolds embedded in the 5-sphere. These generalize both the classical notion of bridge position for knots in the 3-sphere and the bridge trisections of surfaces in the 4-sphere due to…
Knots and links which are closed 3-braids are a very special class. Like 2-bridge knots and links, they are simple enough to admit a complete classification. At the same time they are rich enough to serve as a source of examples on which,…
Knotted and tangled structures frequently appear in physical fields, but so do mechanisms for untying them. To understand how this untying works, we simulate the behavior of 1,458 superfluid vortex knots of varying complexity and scale in…
We study the degree of polynomial representations of knots. We give the lexicographic degree of all two-bridge knots with 11 or fewer crossings. First, we estimate the total degree of a lexicographic parametrisation of such a knot. This…
We calculate the Chern-Simons invariants of the twist knot orbifolds using the Schl\"{a}fli formula for the generalized Chern-Simons function on the family of the twist knot cone-manifold structures. Following the general instruction of…
The entanglement of curves within a 3-periodic box provides a model for complicated space-filling entangled structures occurring in biological, chemical and physical systems. Quantifying the complexity of the entanglement within these…
Given a link in $S^3$ we will use invariants derived from the Alexander module and the Blanchfield pairing to obtain lower bounds on the Gordian distance between links, the unlinking number and various splitting numbers. These lower bounds…
We show that essential punctured spheres in the complement of links with distance three bridge spheres have bounded complexity. We define the operation of tangle product, a generalization of both connected sum and Conway product. Finally,…
Given any closed, connected, orientable $3$--manifold and integers $g\geq g(M), D > 0$, we show the existence of knots in $M$ whose genus $g$ bridge number is greater than $D$. These knots lie in a page of an open book decomposition of $M$,…
For n-bridge decompositions of links in S^3, we propose a practical method to ensure that the Hempel distance is at least two.
This paper concerns the H(2)-unknotting numbers of links related to 2-bridge links. It consists of three parts. In the first part, we consider a necessary and sufficient condition for a 2-bridge link to have H(2)-unknotting number one. The…
We construct knots in S^3 with Heegaard splittings of arbitrarily high distance, in any genus. As an application, for any positive integers t and b we find a tunnel number t knot in the three-sphere which has no (t,b)-decomposition.
The theory of tunnel number 1 knots detailed in our previous paper, The tree of knot tunnels, provides a non-negative integer invariant called the depth of the tunnel. We give various results related to the depth invariant. Noting that it…
Consider a continuous flow in $\mathbb{R}^3$ or any orientable $3$-manifold. Let $(Q_1, Q_0)$ be an index pair in the sense of Conley and consider the region $N := \overline{Q_1 - Q_0}$. (An example of this is a compact $3$-manifold $N$…
In a previous work, the first and third authors studied a random knot model for all two-bridge knots using billiard table diagrams. Here we present a closed formula for the distribution of the crossing numbers of such random knots. We also…
The trace of $n$-framed surgery on a knot in $S^3$ is a 4-manifold homotopy equivalent to the 2-sphere. We characterise when a generator of the second homotopy group of such a manifold can be realised by a locally flat embedded 2-sphere…