Related papers: Symmetric Criticality for Tight Knots
In thermally fluctuating long linear polymeric chain in solution, the ends come from time to time into a direct contact or a close vicinity of each other. At such an instance, the chain can be regarded as a closed one and thus will form a…
Knots are commonly found in molecular chains such as DNA and proteins, and they have been considered to be useful models for structural analysis of these molecules. One interested quantity is the minimum number of monomers necessary to…
We discuss the notion of criticality of semilinear differential equations and systems, its relations to scaling transformations and the Noether approach to Pokhozhaev's identities. For this purpose we propose a definition for criticality…
Knot contact homology is an invariant of knots derived from Legendrian contact homology which has numerous connections to the knot group. We use basic properties of knot groups to prove that knot contact homology detects every torus knot.…
A long standing open conjecture states that if a link $\mathcal{K}$ is alternating, then its ropelength $L(\mathcal{K})$ is at least of the order $O(Cr(\mathcal{K}))$. A recent result shows that the maximum braid index of a link bounds the…
What length of rope (of given diameter) is required to tie a particular knot? To answer this question, we define some new notions of thickness for a space curve, one based on Gromov's distortion, and another generalizing the thickness of…
We present new computations of approximately length-minimizing polygons with fixed thickness. These curves model the centerlines of "tight" knotted tubes with minimal length and fixed circular cross-section. Our curves approximately…
We present a short proof of a theorem of Tanaka that if a composite ribbon knot admits a symmetric union presentation with one twisting region, then it has a non-trivial knot and its mirror image as connected summands.
In the study of ribbon knots, Lamm introduced symmetric unions inspired by earlier work of Kinoshita and Terasaka. We show an identity between the twisted Alexander polynomials of a symmetric union and its partial knot. As a corollary, we…
This article is an overview of the results obtained in recent years on symplectic connections. We present what is known about preferred connections (critical points of a variational principle). The class of Ricci-type connections (for which…
Using Morse theory and a new relative homological linking of pairs, we prove a ``homological linking principle'', thereby generalizing many well known results in critical point theory.
We prove the existence of symmetric critical torus knots for O'Hara's knot energy family $E_\alpha$, $\alpha\in (2,3)$ using Palais' classic principle of symmetric criticality. It turns out that in every torus knot class there are at least…
We study the interplay between entropy and topological constraints for a polymer chain in which sliding rings (slip-links) enforce pair contacts between monomers. These slip-links divide a closed ring polymer into a number of sub-loops…
Link-homotopy and self Delta-equivalence are equivalence relations on links. It was shown by J. Milnor (resp. the last author) that Milnor invariants determine whether or not a link is link-homotopic (resp. self Delta-equivalent) to a…
Entanglement entropy may display a striking new symmetry under M\"obius transformations. This symmetry was analysed in our previous work for the case of a non-critical (gapped) free homogeneous fermionic chain invariant under parity and…
We classify all finite group actions on knots in the 3-sphere. By geometrization, all such actions are conjugate to actions by isometries, and so we may use orthogonal representation theory to describe three cyclic and seven dihedral…
We report on new numerical computations of the set of self-contacts in tightly knotted tubes of uniform circular cross-section. Such contact sets have been obtained before for the trefoil and figure eight knots by simulated annealing -- we…
Although the set of permutation symmetries of a complex network can be very large, few of the symmetries give rise to stable synchronous patterns. Here we present a new framework and develop techniques for controlling synchronization…
Relative self-linking and linking "numbers" for pairs of knots in oriented 3-manifolds are defined in terms of intersection invariants of immersed surfaces in 4-manifolds. The resulting concordance invariants generalize the usual…
Topological phases protected by symmetry can occur in gapped and---surprisingly---in critical systems. We consider non-interacting fermions in one dimension with spinless time-reversal symmetry. It is known that the phases are classified by…