Knot groups, quandle extensions and orderability (Q6183145)

The paper under review studies the relation between orderings and circular orderings on quandles. In general, it is known that if a quandle admits a right (or left) ordering, then it admits a right (or left) circular ordering. The authors first show that a non-trivial right circularly orderable quandle is infinite. This immediately recovers a previously known result that a non-trivial right orderable quandle is infinite. A similar result for a non-trivial left orderable quandle is also proved. Next, the authors discuss the relation between orderability and circular orderability on a quandle extension. Further, they examine the enveloping groups and the \(n\)-enveloping groups of the fundamental link quandles. For example, for a torus knot \(T(p,q)\) with \(p>3\), \(q>5\), the \(2\)-enveloping group of the knot quandle is shown to be right circularly orderable. This contrasts with the fact that the involutory link quandle is not right circularly orderable. The last part gives a new perspective for the non-bi-orderability of a knot or link group by using quandles. More precisely, let \(L\) be an oriented prime link. If the link quandle of \(L\) is not right orderable, then the link group of \(L\) is not bi-circularly orderable. So, it is not bi-orderable. For example, any non-trivial torus knot satisfies this assumption.