Related papers: An almost-integral universal Vassiliev invariant o…
At any order, the perturbative expansion of the expectation values of Wilson lines in Chern-Simons theory gives certain integral expressions. We show that they all lead to knot invariants. Moreover these are finite type invariants whose…
The universal Vassiliev invariant from the perturbative Chern-Simons theory is actually a knot invariant without any correction term. The anomaly considered by Bott and Taubes is proved to be zero.
Chern-Simons gauge theory for compact semisimple groups is analyzed from a perturbation theory point of view. The general form of the perturbative series expansion of a Wilson line is presented in terms of the Casimir operators of the gauge…
A brief summary of the development of perturbative Chern-Simons gauge theory related to the theory of knots and links is presented. Emphasis is made on the progress achieved towards the determination of a general combinatorial expression…
The total twist number, which represents the first non-trivial Vassiliev knot invariant, is derived from the second order expression of the Wilson loop expectation value in the Chern-Simons theory. Using the well-known fact that the…
An invariant of knots is constructed from an integral for geometric braids due to Kohno and Kontsevich. It takes values in a quotient by a certain ideal of the algebra generated by chord diagrams over the circle.
We extend the theory of Vassiliev (or finite type) invariants for knots to knotoids using two different approaches. Firstly, we take closures on knotoids to obtain knots and we use the Vassiliev invariants for knots, proving that these are…
It has been folklore for several years in the knot theory community that certain integrals on configuration space, originally motivated by perturbation theory for the Chern-Simons field theory, converge and yield knot invariants. This was…
Parity mappings from the chords of a Gauss diagram to the integers is defined. The parity of the chords is used to construct families of invariants of Gauss diagrams and virtual knots. One family consists of degree $n$ Vassiliev invariants.
This is a substantially revised version. The Kontsevich integral of a knot is a graph-valued invariant which (when graded by the Vassiliev degree of graphs) is characterized by a universal property; namely it is a universal Vassiliev…
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…
As a generalization of the classical knots, knotoids are equivalence classes of immersions of the oriented unit interval in a surface. In recent years, a variety of invariants of spherical and planar knotoids have been constructed as…
Vassiliev's knot invariants can be computed in different ways but many of them as Kontsevich integral are very difficult. We consider more visual diagram formulas of the type Polyak-Viro and give new diagram formula for the two basic…
Each knot invariant can be extended to singular knots according to the skein rule. A Vassiliev invariant of order at most $n$ is defined as a knot invariant that vanishes identically on knots with more than $n$ double points. A chord…
The "fundamental theorem of Vassiliev invariants" says that every weight system can be integrated to a knot invariant. We discuss four different approaches to the proof of this theorem: a topological/combinatorial approach following M.…
This book is a detailed introduction to the theory of finite type (Vassiliev) knot invariants, with a stress on its combinatorial aspects. It is intended to serve both as a textbook for readers with no or little background in this area, and…
We explore algebraic relations on Vassiliev knot invariants related with correlators in the 3-dimensional Chern--Simons theory. Vassiliev invariants form infinite-dimensional algebra. We focus on $k$-parametric knot families with Vassiliev…
This paper is expository and is accessible to students. We define simple invariants of knots or links (linking number, Arf-Casson invariants and Alexander-Conway polynomials) motivated by interesting results whose statements are accessible…
It has been known that any Alexander polynomial of a knot can be realized by a quasipositive knot. As a consequence, the Alexander polynomial cannot detect quasipositivity. In this paper we prove a similar result about Vassiliev invariants:…
We observe that any knot invariant extends to virtual knots. The isotopy classification problem for virtual knots is reduced to an algebraic problem formulated in terms of an algebra of arrow diagrams. We introduce a new notion of finite…