Stable Knots and Links in Electromagnetic Fields

Persistent topological structures in physical systems have become increasingly important over the last years. Electromagnetic fields with knotted field lines play a special role among these, since they can be used to transfer their knottedness to other systems like plasmas and quantum fluids. In null electromagnetic fields the electric and the magnetic field lines evolve like unbreakable elastic filaments in a fluid flow. In particular, their topology is preserved for all time, so that all knotted closed field lines maintain their knot type. We use an approach due to Bateman to prove that for every link L there is such an electromagnetic field that satisfies Maxwell’s equations in free space and that has closed electric and magnetic field lines in the shape of L for all time. The knotted and linked field lines turn out to be projections of real analytic Legendrian links with respect to the standard contact structure on the 3-sphere.

Legendrian skein algebras and Hall algebras

We compare two associative algebras which encode the “quantum topology” of Legendrian curves in contact threefolds of product type $$S\times {\mathbb {R}}$$ S × R . The first is the skein algebra of graded Legendrian links and the second is the Hall algebra of the Fukaya category of S. We construct a natural homomorphism from the former to the latter, which we show is an isomorphism if S is a disk with marked points and injective if S is the annulus.

Cluster Structures on Double Bott–Samelson Cells

Let $\mathsf {C}$ be a symmetrisable generalised Cartan matrix. We introduce four different versions of double Bott–Samelson cells for every pair of positive braids in the generalised braid group associated to $\mathsf {C}$ . We prove that the decorated double Bott–Samelson cells are smooth affine varieties, whose coordinate rings are naturally isomorphic to upper cluster algebras. We explicitly describe the Donaldson–Thomas transformations on double Bott–Samelson cells and prove that they are cluster transformations. As an application, we complete the proof of the Fock–Goncharov duality conjecture in these cases. We discover a periodicity phenomenon of the Donaldson–Thomas transformations on a family of double Bott–Samelson cells. We give a (rather simple) geometric proof of Zamolodchikov’s periodicity conjecture in the cases of $\Delta \square \mathrm {A}_r$ . When $\mathsf {C}$ is of type $\mathrm {A}$ , the double Bott–Samelson cells are isomorphic to Shende–Treumann–Zaslow’s moduli spaces of microlocal rank-1 constructible sheaves associated to Legendrian links. By counting their $\mathbb {F}_q$ -points we obtain rational functions that are Legendrian link invariants.

AN INVARIANT OF LEGENDRIAN AND TRANSVERSE LINKS FROM OPEN BOOK DECOMPOSITIONS OF CONTACT 3-MANIFOLDS

We introduce a generalization of the Lisca–Ozsváth–Stipsicz–Szabó Legendrian invariant ${\mathfrak L}$ to links in every rational homology sphere, using the collapsed version of link Floer homology. We represent a Legendrian link L in a contact 3-manifold ${(M,\xi)}$ with a diagram D, given by an open book decomposition of ${(M,\xi)}$ adapted to L, and we construct a chain complex ${cCFL^-(D)}$ with a special cycle in it denoted by ${\mathfrak L(D)}$ . Then, given two diagrams ${D_1}$ and ${D_2}$ which represent Legendrian isotopic links, we prove that there is a map between the corresponding chain complexes that induces an isomorphism in homology and sends ${\mathfrak L(D_1)}$ into ${\mathfrak L(D_2)}$ . Moreover, a connected sum formula is also proved and we use it to give some applications about non-loose Legendrian links; that are links such that the restriction of ${\xi}$ on their complement is tight.

On Bennequin-type inequalities for links in tight contact 3-manifolds

We prove that a version of the Thurston–Bennequin inequality holds for Legendrian and transverse links in a rational homology contact 3-sphere [Formula: see text], whenever [Formula: see text] is tight. More specifically, we show that the self-linking number of a transverse link [Formula: see text] in [Formula: see text], such that the boundary of its tubular neighborhood consists of incompressible tori, is bounded by the Thurston norm [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text]. A similar inequality is given for Legendrian links by using the notions of positive and negative transverse push-off. We apply this bound to compute the tau-invariant for every strongly quasi-positive link in [Formula: see text]. This is done by proving that our inequality is sharp for this family of smooth links. Moreover, we use a stronger Bennequin inequality, for links in the tight 3-sphere, to generalize this result to quasi-positive links and determine their maximal self-linking number.

The Legendrian knot complement problem

We prove that every Legendrian knot in the tight contact structure of the [Formula: see text]-sphere is determined by the contactomorphism type of its exterior. Moreover, by giving counterexamples we show this to be not true for Legendrian links in the tight [Formula: see text]-sphere. On the way a new user-friendly formula for computing the Thurston–Bennequin invariant of a Legendrian knot in a surgery diagram is given.

Grid diagram for singular links

In this paper, we define the set of singular grid diagrams [Formula: see text] which provides a unified description for singular links, singular Legendrian links, singular transverse links, and singular braids. We also classify the complete set of all equivalence relations on [Formula: see text] which induce the bijection onto each singular object. This is an extension of the known result of Ng–Thurston [Grid diagrams, braids, and contact geometry, in Proc. Gökova Geometry-Topology Conf. 2008, Gökova Geometry/Topology Conference (GGT), Gökova, 2009, pp. 120–136] for nonsingular links and braids.