Chord index for knots in thickened surfaces (Q2103556)

A `chord index' for knots in a thickened surface is, loosely speaking, an assignment of integers to all classical crossings in a way that generalizes the familiar notion of parity in virtual knots. In earlier work by the first author [\textit{Z. Cheng}, Can. J. Math. 73, No. 3, 597--621 (2021; Zbl 1475.57013)] an axiomatization of generalized chord indices was introduced. These chord indices may take values in any set, and this definition generalizes the chord index for Gauss diagrams. In this paper, a large class of integer-valued chord indices is derived for knots and links in thickened surfaces, and the chord index for Gauss diagrams is also recovered as a special case of this construction. Invariants of links in thickened surfaces generalizing the writhe polynomial are derived from these chord indices. By restricting virtual links to embeddings in thickened surfaces with genus equal to their supporting genus, this also gives rise to invariants of virtual links. The main result of this paper is a homomorphism from a subgroup of \(H_1(\Sigma,\mathbb{Z})\) to the abelian group of integer-valued chord indices of \(K\), for a fixed knot \(K\) in a thickened surface \(\Sigma\times [0,1]\). Here the subgroup of \(H_1(\Sigma,\mathbb{Z})\) depends on \(K\). This result gives rise to a class of chord indices for each knot \(K\) in \(\Sigma\times [0,1]\). After constructing this homomorphism, the authors go on to define the writhe polynomials associated to these chord indices, and give some results on the behaviour of these indices and writhe polynomials under operations on knots in surfaces. Finally the authors discuss applications of these invariants to virtual knots, and mention some further generalizations.