Small knot mosaics and partition matrices

Abstract

Lomonaco and Kauffman introduced knot mosaic system to give a definition of quantum knot system. This definition is intended to represent an actual physical quantum system. A knot $(m,n)$-mosaic is an $m \times n$ matrix of mosaic tiles which are $T_0$ through $T_{10}$ depicted as below, representing a knot or a link by adjoining properly that is called suitably connected. An interesting question in studying mosaic theory is how many knot $(m,n)$-mosaics are there. $D_{m,n}$ denotes the total number of all knot $(m,n)$-mosaics. This counting is very important because the total number of knot mosaics is indeed the dimension of the Hilbert space of these quantum knot mosaics. In this paper, we find a table of the precise values of $D_{m,n}$ for $4 \leq m \leq n \leq 6$ as below. Mainly we use a partition matrix argument which turns out to be remarkably efficient to count small knot mosaics. \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{|c|r|r|r|} \hline $D_{m,n}$ & $n=4$ & $n=5$ & $n=6$ \\ \hline $m=4$ & $2594$ & $54,226$ & $1,144,526$ \\ \hline $m=5$ & & $4,183,954$ & $331,745,962$ \\ \hline $m=6$ & & & $101,393,411,126$ \\ \hline \end{tabular} \end{center}