Tait colorings, and an instanton homology for webs and foams (Q1757298)

The terminology of graphs as webs goes back to the work of \textit{G. Kuperberg} [Commun. Math. Phys. 180, No. 1, 109--151 (1996; Zbl 0870.17005)]. A web \(K\subset \mathbb R^3\) is an embedded trivalent graph. An edge \(e\) of \(K\) is called an embedded bridge if there is a smoothly embedded \(2\)-sphere in \(\mathbb R^3\) which meets \(e\) transversely in a single point and is otherwise disjoint from \(K\). A Tait coloring of \(K\) is a function from the edges of \(K\) to a \(3\)-element set of colors \(\{1, 2, 3\}\) such that edges of three different colors are incident at each vertex. The authors of the paper under review show how to associate a finite-dimensional \(\mathbb F\)-vector space \(J^{\sharp}(K)\) to any web \(K \subset \mathbb R^3\) using a variant of the instanton homology for knots. Here \(\mathbb F\) is a field of two elements. The main result states that for a web \(K \subset \mathbb R^3\), \(J^{\sharp}(K)\) is zero if and only if \(K\) has an embedded bridge. In addition, the authors formulate the following conjecture: If the web \(K\) lies in the plane, so \(K\subset \mathbb R^2 \subset \mathbb R^3\), then the dimension of \(J^{\sharp}(K)\) is equal to the number of Tait colorings of \(K\).