Journal of Knot Theory and Its Ramifications

In this paper we clarify an issue in the knot surgery construction of Fintushel and Stern. Using knot surgery, they construct an infinite number of smooth structures on 4-manifolds satisfying certain conditions, but they do not explicitly work out the circumstances under which two manifolds that arise from their construction will fail to be diffeomorphic on the grounds of Seiberg–Witten theory. This paper fills in that gap.

Quasi-alternating links are a generalization of alternating links. They are homologically thin for both Khovanov homology and knot Floer homology. Recent work of Greene and joint work of the first author with Kofman resulted in the classification of quasi-alternating pretzel links in terms of their integer tassel parameters. Replacing tassels by rational tangles generalizes pretzel links to Montesinos links. In this paper we establish conditions on the rational parameters of a Montesinos link to be quasi-alternating. Using recent results on left-orderable groups and Heegaard Floer L-spaces, we also establish conditions on the rational parameters of a Montesinos link to be non-quasi-alternating. We discuss examples which are not covered by the above results.

We define a tower of affine Temperley–Lieb algebras of type Ã. We prove that there exists a unique Markov trace on this tower, this trace comes from the Markov–Ocneanu–Jones trace on the tower of Temperley–Lieb algebras of type A. We define an invariant of special kind of links as an application of this trace.

Taubes proved that the Casson invariant of an integral homology 3-sphere equals half the Euler characteristic of its instanton Floer homology. We extend this result to all closed oriented 3-manifolds with positive first Betti number by establishing a similar relationship between the Lescop invariant of the manifold and its instanton Floer homology. The proof uses surgery techniques.

We show that most cabled knots over torus knots in S³ satisfy the AJ-conjecture, namely each (r, s)-cabled knot over each (p, q)-torus knot satisfies the AJ-conjecture if r is not a number between 0 and pqs.

In this paper, we develop a method to change the label of a ring in a chart by C-moves and a stabilization where a ring is a simple closed curve consisting of edges of the same label which does not contain any white vertices.