Symmetric critical knots for O'Hara's energies (Q1637112)

The authors deal with O'Hara's energies of knots introduced in [\textit{J. O'Hara}, Topology Appl. 48, No. 2, 147--161 (1992; Zbl 0769.57006)]. They prove the existence of symmetric critical torus knots for O'Hara's energies \(E_\alpha\) for \(\alpha \in (2,3)\). The proof is based in Palais' principle of symmetric criticality. In particularly the authors have spotted that in every torus knot class there are at least two smooth \(E_\alpha\)-critical knots. This result supports experimental observations using numerical gradient flows.