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Knots have a twisted history in quantum physics. They were abandoned as failed models of atoms. Only much later was the connection between knot invariants and Wilson loops in topological quantum field theory discovered. Here we show that…

This paper is an introduction to the theory of virtual knots and links and it gives a list of unsolved problems in this subject.

Given a group endowed with a Z/2-valued morphism we associate a Gauss diagram theory, and show that for a particular choice of the group these diagrams encode faithfully virtual knots on a given arbitrary surface. This theory contains all…

Tied links and the tied braid monoid were introduced recently by the authors and used to define new invariants for classical links. Here, we give a version purely algebraic-combinatoric of tied links. With this new version we prove that the…

We construct the new non-trivial state--sum invariants for virtual knots and links by a generalization of the powerful Carter--Saito--Jelsovsky--Kamada--Langford theorem for classical knots. The main result of this work is based on…

Any knot diagram can be transformed into the unknot by a series of unknotting operations. This paper introduces the diagonal move, a novel unknotting operation that generalizes and unifies several existing moves. We prove that the diagonal…

We review recent efforts to machine learn relations between knot invariants. Because these knot invariants have meaning in physics, we explore aspects of Chern-Simons theory and higher dimensional gauge theories. The goal of this work is to…

In GT/0006019 oriented quantum algebras were motivated and introduced in a natural categorical setting. Invariants of knots and links can be computed from oriented quantum algebras, and this includes the Reshetikhin-Turaev theory for Ribbon…

We introduce new skein invariants of links based on a procedure where we first apply the skein relation only to crossings of distinct components, so as to produce collections of unlinked knots. We then evaluate the resulting knots using a…

Recent work on the loop representation of quantum gravity has revealed previously unsuspected connections between knot theory and quantum gravity, or more generally, 3-dimensional topology and 4-dimensional generally covariant physics. We…

We analyse the perturbative expansion of the knot invariants defined from the unitary representations of the Quantum Lorentz Group in two different ways, namely using the Kontsevich Integral and weight systems, and the $R$-matrix in the…

The theory of welded and extended welded knots is a generalization of classical knot theory. Welded (resp. extended welded) knot diagrams include virtual crossings (resp. virtual crossings and wen marks) and are equivalent under an extended…

We prove that certain problems naturally arising in knot theory are NP--hard or NP--complete. These are the problems of obtaining one diagram from another one of a link in a bounded number of Reidemeister moves, determining whether a link…

The central discovery of $2d$ conformal theory was holomorphic factorization, which expressed correlation functions through bilinear combinations of conformal blocks, which are easily cut and joined without a need to sum over the entire…

The aim of this survey article is to highlight several notoriously intractable problems about knots and links, as well as to provide a brief discussion of what is known about them.

The topological framework of circuit topology has recently been introduced to complement knot theory and to help in understanding the physics of molecular folding. Naturally evolved linear molecular chains, such as proteins and nucleic…

Virtual knot theory is a generalization of knot theory which is based on Gauss chord diagrams and link diagrams on closed oriented surfaces. A twisted knot is a generalization of a virtual knot, which corresponds to a link diagram on a…

We construct knot invariants categorifying the quantum knot variants for all representations of quantum groups. We show that these invariants coincide with previous invariants defined by Khovanov for sl(2) and sl(3) and by…

Kauffman and Lomonaco explored the idea of understanding quantum entanglement (the non-local correlation of certain properties of particles) topologically by viewing unitary entangling operators as braiding operators. In the work of G.…

The lectures review the state of affairs in modern branch of mathematical physics called probabilistic topology. In particular we consider the following problems: (i) We estimate the probability of a trivial knot formation on the lattice…