Kontsevich invariant


In the mathematical theory of knots, the Kontsevich invariant, also known as the Kontsevich integral of an oriented framed link, is a universal Vassiliev invariant in the sense that any coefficient of the Kontsevich invariant is of a finite type, and conversely any finite type invariant can be presented as a linear combination of such coefficients. It was defined by Maxim Kontsevich.
The Kontsevich invariant is a universal quantum invariant in the sense that any quantum invariant may be recovered by substituting the appropriate [|weight system] into any [|Jacobi diagram].

Definition

The Kontsevich invariant is defined by monodromy along solutions of the Knizhnik–Zamolodchikov equations.

Jacobi diagram and Chord diagram

Definition

Let be a circle. As is shown in the figure on the right, a Jacobi diagram with order is the graph with vertices, with the external circle depicted as solid line circle and with dashed lines called inner graph, which satisfies the following conditions:
  1. The orientation is given only to the external circle.
  2. The vertices have values 1 or 3. The valued 3 vertices are connected to one of the other edge with clockwise or anti-clockwise direction depicted as the little directed circle. The valued 1 vertices are connected to the external circle without multiplicity, ordered by the orientation of the circle.
The edges on are called chords. We denote as the quotient space of the commutative group generated by all the Jacobi diagrams on divided by the following relations:
A diagram without vertices valued 3 is called a chord diagram. If every connected component of a graph has a vertex valued 3, then we can make the Jacobi diagram into a Chord diagram using the STU relation recursively. If we restrict ourselves only to chord diagrams, then the above four relations are reduced to the following two relations:

Properties

A map from the Jacobi diagrams to the positive integers is called a weight system. The map extended to the space is also called the weight system. They have the following properties:
Jacobi diagrams were introduced as analogues of Feynman diagrams when Kontsevich defined knot invariants by iterated integrals in the first half of 1990s. He represented singular points of singular knots by chords, i.e. he treated only with chord diagrams. D. Bar-Natan later formulated them as the 1-3 valued graphs and studied their algebraic properties, and called them "Chinese character diagrams" in his paper. Several terms such as chord diagrams, web diagrams, or Feynman diagrams were used to refer them, but they have been called Jacobi diagrams since around 2000, because the IHX relation corresponds to the Jacobi identity for Lie algebras.
We can interpret them from a more general point of view by claspers, which were defined independently by Goussarov and Kazuo Habiro in the later half of the 1990s.