Invariants of links in thickened surfaces (Q2444353)

The authors define a group-valued invariant associated to a knot or link in a thickened surface using the deck transformations of the universal cover of the supporting surface of the knot or link. This group is used to define invariants of the knot or link, including polynomial invariants analogous to the Alexander polynomial as well as an integer-valued invariant called symplectic rank. Since a virtual knot or link can be regarded as an equivalence class of knots or links in thickened surfaces, these invariants apply naturally to virtual knots and links. The authors show that these invariants can be employed to detect non-classicality of virtual knots and links and to compute virtual genus.