Ribbonlength of families of folded ribbon knots (Q2681309)

As model we want to think of a ribbon knots as made of a thin strip of paper folded flat in the plane, introduced by \textit{L. H. Kauffman} [Ser. Knots Everything 36, 495--506 (2005; Zbl 1094.57009)]. Formally, a folded ribbon knot is a piecewise linear immersion of an annulus or Möbius band into the plane, where the fold lines are the only singularities, and where the crossing information is consistent. Let \(w\) be the width of the annulus or Möbius band, then the folded ribbon-length (or just ribbon-length) of a folded ribbon knot \(K\) is the quotient of the length of \(K\) (the center line of the of annulus or Möbius band) and the width \(w\): \(Rib(K_w) = Len(K)/w\). The (folded) ribbon-length problem asks us to ``minimize'' the ribbon-length for a given knot type. In this paper the one authors continue the study of ribbon-length, see [\textit{E. Denne}, J. Knot Theory Ramifications 30, No. 4, Article ID 2150028, 21 p. (2021; Zbl 1470.57007); \textit{E. Denne} and \textit{T. Larsen}, J. Knot Theory Ramifications 32, No. 1, Article ID 2350003, 42 p. (2023; Zbl 07661880); \textit{E. Denne} et al., Contemp. Math. 689, 37--51 (2017; Zbl 1404.57006)]. In this paper the authors give upper bounds on the folded ribbon-length of 2-bridge knots, \((n,2)\) torus knots, twist knots, and pretzel knots, and these upper bounds turn out to be linear in the crossing number. The authors give a new way to fold \((p,q)\) torus knots (with \(p\ge q\ge 2\)) and show that their ribbon-length is bounded above by \(2p\). They also show that any \((p,q)\) torus knot \(K\) has a constant \(c > 0\), such that the ribbon-length is bounded above by \(c\times\sqrt{cr(K)}\). This provides an example of an upper bound on folded ribbon-length that is sublinear in crossing number.