Topology Seminar

Speaker: Robin Koytcheff (University of Victoria)

Coauthors: John Burke

Title: A colored operad for string link infection

Abstract: Budney recently constructed an operad which encodes splicing of knots and gave a decomposition of the space of knots over this splicing operad. Infection of links by string links is a generalization of splicing from knots to links and is useful in studying knot concordance. We construct a colored operad that encodes infection. This colored operad captures all the relations in the 2-string link monoid. We also show that a certain subspace of 2-string links is freely generated over a suboperad of our infection colored operad by its subspace of prime links.