Invariants of framed links from cohomology of ternary self-distributive structures

Emanuele Zappala (University of South Florida)

In this talk I recall the definitions of shelf/rack/quandle and their cohomology theory. I also give the construction of cocycle invariant of links, due to Carter, Jelsovsky, Kamada, Langford and Saito (Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 355 (2003), 3947-3989). Then, I introduce higher arity self-distributive structures and show that an appropriate diagrammatic interpretation of them is suitable to define a ternary version of the cocycle invariant for framed link invariants, via blackboard framings. I discuss the computation of cohomology of ternary structures, as composition of mutually distributive operations, and a cohomology theory of certain ternary quandles called group heaps. Furthermore I mention a categorical version of self-distributivity, along with examples from Lie algebras and Hopf algebras, and the construction of ribbon categories from ternary operations that provide a quantum interpretation of the (ternary) cocycle invariant. 

 

References:  

Elhamdadi, Mohamed, Masahico Saito, and Emanuele Zappala. “Higher Arity Self-Distributive Operations in Cascades and their Cohomology.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.00440 (2019).

Elhamdadi, Mohamed, Masahico Saito, and Emanuele Zappala. “Heap and Ternary Self-Distributive Cohomology.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.02877 (2019).

Zappala, Emanuele. “Non-Associative Algebraic Structures in Knot Theory.” (2020).