On usual, virtual and welded knotted objects up to homotopy (Q2407553)

The article under review concerns knotted objects, namely pure braids and string links (i.e., pure tangles without closed components). These knotted objects are considered diagramatically and modulo (the classical) Reidemeister moves. Under consideration in this article are also objects which are obtained by considering the ones referred to above modulo generalized Reidemeister moves, yielding virtual string links; then by considering virtual string links modulo the so-called Overcrossings Commute relation, welded string links are obtained. Further consideration of these and other knotted objects modulo self-crossing changes or self-crossing virtualization yields new classes of objects. The main results of this article concern the inclusions of these different quotients among themselves and with some groups of automorphisms of the free groups and their quotients. Some of these are already found in the literature; but the authors provide in Figure 1 a network of these inclusions where they tell apart their contributions from others'. As for the proofs, they rely on Gauss diagrams so the authors provide a quick tutorial on these in Section 3. Finally, in Section 5 a number of questions are collected for further work.