Jaeger composition product
A formula for the Jones–Conway polynomial, describing it as a sum of products of the Jones–Conway polynomials of pieces of the diagram. It has its root in the statistical mechanics model of the Jones–Conway polynomial by V.F.R. Jones. It has been applied to periodic links and to the building of a Hopf algebra structure on the Jones–Conway skein module of the product of a surface and an interval [a3], [a4], [a2].
To define the Jaeger composition product it is convenient to work with the following regular isotopy variant of the Jones–Conway polynomial:
 |
where 
is the number of link components and 
is the algebraic sum of the signs of the crossings of 
. It is also convenient to add the empty link, 
, to the set of links and put 
. 
satisfies the skein relation
 |
and 
. The advantage of working with 
is that 
(no negative powers of 
) and that the Jaeger composition product has a nice simple form. Indeed ([a1]): Let 
be a diagram of an oriented link in 
, then
 |
 |
The meaning of the used symbols is as follows. To define 
, consider 
as a 
-valent graph. Let 
denote the set of edges of the graph 
. A 
-labelling of 
is a function 
such that around a vertex the following labellings are allowed:
Figure: j130010a
The set of 
-labellings of 
is denoted by 
. The edges of 
with label 
form an oriented link diagram, denoted by 
. The vertices of 
which are neither in 
nor 
are called 
-smoothing vertices of 
. Let 
(respectively, 
) denote the number of negative (respectively, positive) 
-smoothing vertices of 
. Let 
and define 
. Finally, 
denotes the rotational number of 
, i.e. the sum of the signs of the Seifert circles of 
, where the sign of such a circle is 
if it is oriented counterclockwise and 
otherwise.
References
| [a1] | F. Jaeger, "Composition products and models for the Homfly polynomial" L'Enseign. Math. , 35 (1989) pp. 323–361 |
| [a2] | J.H. Przytycki, "Quantum group of links in a handlebody" M. Gerstenhaber (ed.) J.D. Stasheff (ed.) , Deformation Theory and Quantum Groups with Applications to Mathematical Physics , Contemp. Math. , 134 (1992) pp. 235–245 |
| [a3] | J.H. Przytycki, "A simple proof of the Traczyk–Yokota criteria for periodic knots" Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. , 123 (1995) pp. 1607–1611 |
| [a4] | V.G. Turaev, "Skein quantization of Poisson algebras of loops on surfaces" Ann. Sci. Ecole Norm. Sup. , 4 : 24 (1991) pp. 635–704 |
Jaeger composition product. Encyclopedia of Mathematics. URL: http://encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php?title=Jaeger_composition_product&oldid=18470