On finite type invariants of welded string links and ribbon tubes (Q6190602)

A welded knotted object is the equivalence class of a virtual diagram modulo certain local moves called the generalized Reidemeister moves and the OC move. A ribbon knotted surface in 4-space is a surface that is the boundary of an immersed 3-manifold whose singularities are ``ribbon singularities'', and a ribbon tube is a ribbon knotted annuli in the 4-ball presented by a virtual diagram. There is a surjective homomorphism from the welded knotted objects to the monoid of ribbon tubes up to isotopy fixing the boundary. An welded string link is the welded class of several strings in the disk \([0,1] \times [0,1]\) such that each string is from a point of \([0,1] \times \{0\}\) to a point of \([0,1] \times \{1\}\). Two welded string links are \(w_k\)-equivalent if they are related by a finite sequence of surgeries along a certain connected unitrivalent tree called a \(w_l\)-tree for \(l \geq k\), and generalized Reidemeister moves and OC moves. \newline In this paper, the authors investigate welded string links up to \(w_k\)-equivalence. The main result is that for \(n\)-component ribbon tubes \(T\) and \(T'\), the following (1)--(3) are equivalent for \(k=2,3\): (1) \(T\) and \(T'\) are \(RC_k\)-equivalent; where the \(RC_k\)-equivalence is an equivalence relation, that is a higher dimensional analogue of \(C_k\)-equivalence for knotted objects due to Habiro. (2) \(\nu(T)=\nu(T')\) for any finite type invariant \(\nu\) of degree smaller than \(k\). (3) \(T\) and \(T'\) cannot be distinguished by the linking numbers and the invariants called the closure invariants; where the closure invariant is an invariant for welded string links, given by using the normalized coefficients of the Alexander polynomial. The authors use as the main tool the arrow calculus, that is a welded analogue of the clasper calculus due to Habiro.