Related papers: A Note on Pure Braids and Link Concordance

In the 1920's Artin defined the braid group in an attempt to understand knots in a more algebraic setting. A braid is a certain arrangement of strings in three-dimensional space. It is a celebrated theorem of Alexander that every knot is…

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,…

Boyer, Gordon, and Watson have conjectured that an irreducible rational homology 3-sphere is an L-space if and only if its fundamental group is not left-orderable. Since Dehn surgeries on knots in $S^3$ can produce large families of…

Given a knot or link in the handlebody, $H_g$, of genus $g$ we prove that it can always be represented as the plat closure of a braid in $H_g$. We further establish the Hilden braid group for the handlebody, as a subgroup of the mixed braid…

A quandle is a self-distributive algebraic structure that appears in quasi-group and knot theories. For each abelian group A and c \in A we define a quandle G(A, c) on \Z_3 \times A. These quandles are generalizations of a class of…

We study a quotient of the group algebra of the braid group in which the Artin generators satisfy a cubic relation. This quotient is maximal among the ones satisfying such a cubic relation. It is finite-dimensional for at least n at most 5…

The knot group is the fundamental group of a knot or link complement. A necessary and sufficient conditions for a group to be realized as the knot group of some link was provided. This result was shown using the closed braid method.…

In the present paper we construct braid group actions on quantum symmetric pair coideal subalgebras of type AIII/AIV. This completes the proof of a conjecture by Kolb and Pellegrini in the case where the underlying Lie algebra is…

We produce an explicit description of the K-theory and K-homology of the pure braid group on $n$ strands. We describe the Baum--Connes correspondence between the generators of the left- and right-hand sides for $n=4$. Using functoriality of…

Twisted knot theory, introduced by M.O. Bourgoin, is a generalization of virtual knot theory. It naturally yields the notion of a twisted braid, which is closely related to the notion of a virtual braid due to Kauffman. In this paper, we…

For non-abelian simple objects in a unitary modular category, the density of their braid group representations, the #P-hard evaluation of their associated link invariants, and the BQP-completeness of their anyonic quantum computing models…

We introduce a new technique for showing classical knots and links are not slice. As one application we resolve a long-standing question as to whether certain natural families of knots contain topologically slice knots. We also present a…

We consider quotients of the group algebra of the $3$-string braid group $B_3$ by $p$-th order generic polynomial relations on the elementary braids. In cases $p=2,3,4,5$ these quotient algebras are finite dimensional. We give…

We show that two knots have matching Vassiliev invariants of order less than n if and only if they are equivalent modulo the nth group of the lower central series of some pure braid group, thus characterizing Vassiliev's knot invariants in…

In the present paper, we introduce $\mathbb{Z}_2$-braids and, more generally, $G$-braids for an arbitrary group $G$. They form a natural group-theoretic counterpart of $G$-knots, see \cite{reidmoves}. The underlying idea, used in the…

Sometime ago, we showed that a pure Artin braid group is not K\"ahler, i.e. it is not the fundamental group of a compact K\"ahler manifold. This used a result of Bressler, Ramachandran and the author that K\"ahler groups cannot be too…

The concordance genus of a knot K is the minimum three-genus among all knots concordant to K. For prime knots of 10 or fewer crossings there have been three knots for which the concordance genus was unknown. Those three cases are now…

Traditionally, knot theorists have considered projections of knots where there are two strands meeting at every crossing. A multi-crossing is a crossing where more than two strands meet at a single point, such that each strand bisects the…

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…

Let $G$ be a nonabelian, simple group with a nontrivial conjugacy class $C \subseteq G$. Let $K$ be a diagram of an oriented knot in $S^3$, thought of as computational input. We show that for each such $G$ and $C$, the problem of counting…