Local biquandles and Niebrzydowski's tribracket theory (Q1738962)

The main results are as follows. The authors introduce a new algebraic structure called local biquandles, and show how to assign colorings of oriented classical link diagrams or broken surface diagrams using tribracket colorings. They discuss a (co)homology theory for local biquandles and show that it is isomorphic to Niebrzydowski's tribracket (co)homology. Niebrzydowski's cocycle invariants and local biquandle cocycle invariants are the same through the isomorphism between two cohomology groups. They provide examples of cocycles and compute cocycle invariants. \newline We explain the main results in more detail. A knot-theoretic horizontal-ternary-quasigroup (respectively, vertical-ternary-quasigroup) is a pair $(X, [\,])$ (respectively, $(X, \langle\,\rangle)$) of a set $X$ and a ternary operation $[\,]: X^3 \to X$ (respectively, $\langle \,\rangle: X^3 \to X$) satisfying certain axioms obtained from the oriented Reidemeister moves of link diagrams, and from an assignment of an element of $X$ to each region of a link diagram with a `horizontal' or `vertical' condition. The operation $[\,]$ (respectively, $\langle \,\rangle$) is called a horizontal tribracket (respectively, a vertical tribracket). Horizontal and vertical tribrackets are induced from each other. A local biquandle is a triple $(X, \{\underline{\star}_a\}_{a \in X}, \{\overline{\star}_a\}_{a \in X})$ of a set $X$ and two families of operations $\underline{\star}_a, \overline{\star}_a: (\{a\} \times X)^2 \to X^2$ satisfying certain axioms, where the axioms induce those analogous to the axioms of a biquandle. A local biquandle has the corresponding knot-theoretic horizontal-ternary-quasigroup: Given a local biquandle, we have a certain knot-theoretic horizontal-ternary-quasigroup, and given a knot-theoretic horizontal-ternary-quasigroup $(X, [\,])$, we can construct a local biquandle from which we have $(X, [\,])$. For a local biquandle, the authors assign colorings of oriented classical link diagrams or broken surface diagrams using the tribracket $[\,]$ of the corresponding knot-theoretic horizontal-ternary-quasigroup. \textit{M. Niebrzydowski} [``Ternary quasigroups in knot theory'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1708.05330}] studied knot-theoretic vertical-tribrackets $\langle \, \rangle$, and discussed a (co)homology theory for knot-theoretic ternary quasigroups. The authors study the correspondence between their (co)homology theory for local biquandles and that of Niebrzydowski.