Closures of positive braids and the Morton-Franks-Williams inequality (Q2252593)

The paper under review studies the relation of simple braids and the so called Morton-Franks-Williams inequality. If \( T(\alpha)\) is a simple braid having permutation \(\alpha\) and \(\hat T(\alpha)\) denotes the closure of the braid \( T(\alpha)\), then the authors show: Proposition 2.1. Let \(\alpha\in S_n\) be a permutation with length \(w=\ell(\alpha)\). Then \(\partial_v^{+}(P(\hat T_{\alpha}))=w+n-1\) if and only if \(\alpha=id\), and the coefficient of \(v^{w+n-1}\) in \(P(\hat T_{id})\) is \((-z)^{1-n}\). This is the main result of the paper, which appears in Section 2, and in the remaining three sections the authors use the result above to obtain several applications. In Section 3 they reprove the following result: Theorem 3.1 (Kálmán): The set of simple braids \(\{T_{\alpha}\}_{\alpha\in S_n}\) is an orthonormal basis for \(< .\;,\;. >_R\). In Section 4 the authors consider the concept of simple resolution tree and the main result is to say when the closure of a braid satisfies the Morton-Franks-Williams inequality in terms of its simple resolution tree. Namely: Theorem 4.1: Let \(L=\hat b\) be a link obtained as the closure of a positive braid \(b\) of \(n\) strands and writhe \(w\). Then \(b\) admits a simple resolution tree and, moreover, the Morton-Franks-Williams upper bound is sharp for \(L\), that is, \(\partial_v^+(P(L))=w+n-1\), if and only if at least one leaf in this simple resolution tree is the identity braid. Then several results in form of corollaries are derived. In Section 5 the authors study the braid index of the closure of positive braids on 3 strands. The main result is Theorem 5.1 where they describe, up to cyclic permutation, for which positive words the closure of the corresponding braid have braid index less than three. More precisely they show that this is the case if and only if the positive word \(w\) is one of the words: {\parindent=6mm\begin{itemize}\item[1-] \(\sigma_1\sigma_2^p \;or \;\sigma_2\sigma_1^p,\text{ for }p\geq 0,\) \item[2-] \(\sigma_1\sigma_2 \sigma_1^p\sigma_2^q \text{ or } \sigma_2\sigma_1 \sigma_2^p\sigma_1^q. \) \end{itemize}}