Related papers: Slice-torus link invariants, combinatorial invaria…

We use the Birman-Ko-Lee presentation of the braid group to show that all closures of strongly quasipositive braids whose normal form contains a positive power of the dual Garside element $\delta$ are fibered. We classify links which admit…

We show that a positive braid knot has maximal topological 4-genus exactly if it has maximal signature invariant. As an application, we determine all positive braid knots with maximal topological 4-genus and compute the topological 4-genus…

The twisted torsion of a 3-manifold is well-known to be zero whenever the corresponding twisted Alexander module is non-torsion. Under mild extra assumptions we introduce a new twisted torsion invariant which is always non-zero. We show how…

A differential geometric characterization of the braid-index of a link is found. After multiplication by 2pi, it equals the infimum of the sum of total curvature and total absolute torsion over holonomic representatives of the link. Upper…

Let $\phi : S^1\times D^2\to S^1$ be the natural projection. An oriented knot $K\hookrightarrow V = S^1\times D^2$ is called an almost closed braid if the restriction of $\phi$ to K has exactly two (non-degenerate) critical points (and K is…

We show that the Casson knot invariant, linking number and Milnor's triple linking number, together with a certain 2-string link invariant $V_2$, are necessary and sufficient to express any string link Vassiliev invariant of order two.…

We give examples of knots with some unusual properties of the crossing number of positive diagrams or strand number of positive braid representations. In particular we show that positive braid knots may not have positive minimal (strand…

We use techniques of Freedman and Teichner to prove that, under certain circumstances, the multi-infection of a slice link is again slice (not necessarily smoothly slice). We provide a general context for proving links are slice that…

We show that if a knot admits a prime, twist-reduced diagram with at least 4 twist regions and at least 6 crossings per twist region, then every non-trivial Dehn filling of that knot is hyperbolike. A similar statement holds for links. We…

The notion of free link is a generalized notion of virtual link. In the present paper we define the group of free braids, prove the Alexander theorem that all free links can be obtained as closures of free braids and prove a Markov theorem,…

In this paper, we give a simple proof for the small cancellation conditions of the upper presentations of 2-bridge link groups, which holds the key to the proof of the main result of [1]. We also give an alternative proof of the main result…

The depth of a link measures the minimum height of a resolving tree for the link whose leaves are all unlinks. We show that the depth of the closure of a strictly positive braid word is the length of the word minus the number of distinct…

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…

We compute the next-to-top term of knot Floer homology for positive braid links. The rank is 1 for any prime positive braid knot. We give some examples of fibered positive links that are not positive braids.

This short note is about three-stranded pretzel knots that have an even number of crossings in one of the strands. We calculate the braid index of such knots and determine which of them are quasipositive. The main tools are the…

We generalise theorems of Cochran-Lickorish and Owens-Strle to the case of links with more than one component. This enables the use of linking forms on double branched covers, Heegaard Floer correction terms, and Donaldson's diagonalisation…

We provide an algorithm to determine whether a link L admits a crossing change that turns it into a split link, under some fairly mild hypotheses on L. The algorithm also provides a complete list of all such crossing changes. It can…

We provide a new bound on the maximum degree of the Jones polynomial of a positive link with second Jones coefficient equal to $\pm 1$ or $\pm 2$. This builds upon the result of our previous work, in which we found such a bound for positive…

We introduce a new class of links for which we give a lower bound for the slice genus $g_*$, using the generalized Rasmussen invariant. We show that this bound, in some cases, allows one to compute $g_*$ exactly; in particular, we compute…

A link is almost alternating if it is non-alternating and has a diagram that can be transformed into an alternating diagram via one crossing change. We give formulas for the first two and last two potential coefficients of the Jones…