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A criterion for almost alternating links to be non-splittable

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2004

TATSUYA TSUKAMOTO
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematical Sciences, School of Science and Engineering, Waseda University, 3-4-1 Okubo Shinjuku-Ku, Tokyo 169-8555, Japan. e-mail: tsukamoto@fuji.waseda.jp

Abstract

The notion of almost alternating links was introduced by C. Adams et al ([1]). We give a sufficient condition for an almost alternating link diagram to represent a non-splittable link. This solves a question asked in [1, 3]. A partial solution for special almost alternating links has been obtained by M. Hirasawa ([5]). As an application, Theorem 2.2 gives us a simple finite algorithm to decide if a given almost alternating link diagram represents a splittable link without increasing the number of crossings of diagrams in the process. Moreover, we show that almost alternating links with more than two components are non-trivial. In Section 2, we state these results in detail. To prove our theorem, we use a technique invented by W. Menasco (see [6, 7]), this is reviewed in Section 3. We also apply “the charge and discharge method” to our graph-theoretic argument, which was used to prove the four color theorem in [4], we explain this in Section 4.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2004 Cambridge Philosophical Society

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