Related papers: Braids, knots and contact structures

We investigate the line between tight and overtwisted for surgeries on fibred transverse knots in contact 3-manifolds. When the contact structure $\xi_K$ is supported by the fibred knot $K \subset M$, we obtain a characterisation of when…

This is an expository article of our work on analogies between knot theory and algebraic number theory. We shall discuss foundational analogies between knots and primes, 3-manifolds and number rings mainly from the group-theoretic point of…

The altenating knots, links and twists projected on the S_2 sphere are identified with the phase Space of a Hamiltonian dynamic system of one degree of freedom. The saddles of the system correspond to the crossing points, the edges, to the…

It has been conjectured that the geometric invariant of knots in 3-space called the width is nearly additive. That is, letting w(K) in N denote the width of a knot K in S^3, the conjecture is that w(K # K') = w(K) + w(K') - 2. We give an…

Musical gestures connect the symbolic layer of the score to the physical layer of sound. I focus here on the mathematical theory of musical gestures, and I propose its generalization to include braids and knots. In this way, it is possible…

Recently Witten introduced a type IIB brane construction with certain boundary conditions to study knot invariants and Khovanov homology. The essential ingredients used in his work are the topologically twisted N = 4 Yang-Mills theory,…

It is shown that every knot or link is the set of complex tangents of a 3-sphere smoothly embedded in the three-dimensional complex space. We show in fact that a one-dimensional submanifold of a closed orientable 3-manifold can be realised…

In this article, we propose a new approach for describing and understanding knots and links in a 3-manifold through the use of an embedded non-orientable surface. Specifically, we define a plat-like representation based on this…

Knots and links are fascinating and intricate topological objects. Their influence spans from DNA and molecular chemistry to vortices in superfluid helium, defects in liquid crystals and cosmic strings in the early universe. Here, we find…

A method to obtain explicit and complete topological solution of SU(2) Chern-Simons theory on $S^3$ is developed. To this effect the necessary aspects of the theory of coloured-oriented braids and duality properties of conformal blocks for…

We characterize the (1, 1) knots in the three-sphere and lens spaces that admit non-trivial L-space surgeries. As a corollary, 1-bridge braids in these manifolds admit non- trivial L-space surgeries. We also recover a characterization of…

Physical knots and links are one-dimensional submanifolds of R^3 with fixed length and thickness. We show that isotopy classes in this category can differ from those of classical knot and link theory. In particular we exhibit a Gordian…

We give an introduction to the physics and mathematics involved in the recently observed relation between topological string theory and knot contact homology and then discuss this relation. The note is based on two lectures given at the…

Using elementary counting methods of weight systems for finite type invariants of knots and integral homology 3-spheres, in the spirit of [B-NG], we answer positively three questions raised in [Ga]. In particular, we exhibit a one-to-one…

We propose a new notation for the states in some models of quantum gravity, namely 4-valent spin networks embedded in a topological three manifold. With the help of this notation, equivalence moves, namely translations and rotations, can be…

We propose a gauge model of quantum electrodynamics (QED) and its nonabelian generalization from which we derive knot invariants such as the Jones polynomial. Our approach is inspired by the work of Witten who derived knot invariants from…

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 introduce and explore the relation between quivers and 3-manifolds with the topology of the knot complement. This idea can be viewed as an adaptation of the knots-quivers correspondence to Gukov-Manolescu invariants of knot complements…

We show that any of the new knot invariants obtained from Chern-Simons theory based on an arbitrary non-abelian gauge group do not distinguish isotopically inequivalent mutant knots and links. In an attempt to distinguish these knots and…

This paper is an overview of the idea of using contact geometry to construct invariants of immersions and embeddings. In particular, it discusses how to associate a contact manifold to any manifold and a Legendrian submanifold to an…