Computing the Conway polynomial of several closures of oriented 3-braids (Q409593)

An \(n\)-tangle is a pair \((B,A)\), where \(B\) is a 3-ball and \(A\) is a properly embedded 1-submanifold in \(B\) whose boundary consists of \(2n\) points. The tangle is oriented if each one of the components of \(A\) is oriented. Tangles are assumed to be in a room, which roughly speaking means that the tangle is projected to a square, where \(n\) endpoints of the arcs of the tangle lie at the left side of the square, and the other \(n\) endpoints lie at the right side of the square. If \(S\) and \(T\) are coherently oriented, the juxtaposition \(S\cdot T\) can be defined. In this paper a certain family of 3-tangles is studied. These tangles do not have an standard orientation, i.e., no all oriented arcs go from left to right. For such a tangle \(S\), an invariant \(\mathcal {I}(S)\) is defined, which is a 6-ordered tuple where each entry is the Conway polynomial of a certain closure of the tangle. For tangles \(S\), \(T\), a formula is given which calculates \(\mathcal {I}(S\cdot T)\) in terms of \(\mathcal {I}(S)\) and \(\mathcal {I}(T)\). In the case that \(S\) is a 3-braid, some explicit nonrecursive formulas are given for \(\mathcal {I}(S)\), in terms of a certain sequence of integers that determine the braid. The calculations are based in part in previous work of one of the authors [\textit{H. Cabrera-Ibarra}, Bol. Soc. Mat. Mex., III. Ser. 10, Spec. Iss., 55--62 (2004; Zbl 1120.57002)].