Abstract
We develop a calculus for diagrams of knotted objects. We define arrow presentations, which encode the crossing information of a diagram into arrows in a way somewhat similar to Gauss diagrams, and more generally –tree presentations, which can be seen as “higher-order Gauss diagrams”. This arrow calculus is used to develop an analogue of Habiro’s clasper theory for welded knotted objects, which contain classical link diagrams as a subset. This provides a “realization” of Polyak’s algebra of arrow diagrams at the welded level, and leads to a characterization of finite-type invariants of welded knots and long knots. As a corollary, we recover several topological results due to Habiro and Shima and to Watanabe on knotted surfaces in –space. We also classify welded string links up to homotopy, thus recovering a result of the first author with Audoux, Bellingeri and Wagner.
Citation
Jean-Baptiste Meilhan. Akira Yasuhara. "Arrow calculus for welded and classical links." Algebr. Geom. Topol. 19 (1) 397 - 456, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2140/agt.2019.19.397
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