Related papers: Properties of closed 3-braids
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…
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 prove that any link admitting a diagram with a single negative crossing is strongly quasipositive. This answers a question of Stoimenow's in the (strong) positive. As a second main result, we give simple and complete characterizations of…
We introduce and develop a language of semigroups over the braid groups for a study of braid monodromy factorizations (bmf's) of plane algebraic curves and other related objects. As an application we give a new proof of Orevkov's theorem on…
A Gauss diagram is a simple, combinatorial way to present a link. It is known that any Vassiliev invariant may be obtained from a Gauss diagram formula that involves counting subdiagrams of certain combinatorial types. In this paper we…
We study taut foliations on the complements of non-split positive braid closures in $S^3$. If $L$ is such a link with components $L_1,\ldots,L_n$ and at least one component is not the unknot, then the Dehn surgery along a multislope…
We show that for each Seifert form of an algebraically slice knot with nontrivial Alexander polynomial, there exists an infinite family of knots having the Seifert form such that the knots are linearly independent in the knot concordance…
The triple linking number of an oriented surface link was defined as an analogical notion of the linking number of a classical link. We consider a certain $m$-component $T^2$-link ($m \geq 3$) determined from two commutative pure $m$-braids…
T-positive links form a subset of strongly quasipositive links that strictly contains the set of all non-split braid positive links. Analogous to Baader's characterisation of positive links as precisely the strongly quasipositive and…
Let $f$ be a homogeneous polynomial over a field. For many fields, including number fields and function fields, we prove that the strength of $f$ is bounded above by a constant multiple of the Birch rank of $f.$ The constant depends only on…
We study 3-braid knots of finite smooth concordance order. A corollary of our main result is that a chiral 3-braid knot of finite concordance order is ribbon.
We investigate the problem of characterising the family of strongly quasipositive links which have definite symmetrised Seifert forms and apply our results to the problem of determining when such a link can have an L-space cyclic branched…
We provide a bound on the maximum degree of the Jones polynomial of any positive link with second Jones coefficient equal to $\pm 1$. This builds on the result of our previous work, in which we found such a bound for positive fibered links.
We consider open, oriented 3-manifolds which are infinite connected sums of closed 3-manifolds. We introduce some topological invariants for these manifolds and obtain a classification in the case where there are only finitely many summands…
It is well known that the minimum crossing number of an alternating link equals the number of crossings in any reduced alternating link diagram of the link. This remarkable result is an application of the Jones polynomial. In the case of…
A result by Dehornoy (1992) says that every nontrivial braid admits a sigma-definite word representative, defined as a braid word in which the generator sigma_i with maximal index i appears with exponents that are all positive, or all…
We show that every trivial 3-strand braid diagram contains a disk, defined as a ribbon ending in opposed crossings. Under a convenient algebraic form, the result extends to every Artin--Tits group of dihedral type, but it fails to extend to…
We generalize the Guth--Katz joints theorem from lines to varieties. A special case says that $N$ planes (2-flats) in 6 dimensions (over any field) have $O(N^{3/2})$ joints, where a joint is a point contained in a triple of these planes not…
This paper shows that the Seifert volume of each closed non-trivial graph manifold is virtually positive. As a consequence, for each closed orientable prime 3-manifold $N$, the set of mapping degrees $\c{D}(M,N)$ is finite for any…
A crossing in a knot is nugatory if changing the crossing does not change the knot type. Using an invariant of certain types of closed 3-braid diagrams, we show that if a closed 3-braid contains a nugatory crossing then its braid index is…