arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Daniel Altschuler.
At any order, the perturbative expansion of the expectation values of Wilson lines in Chern-Simons theory gives certain integral expressions. We show that they all lead to knot invariants. Moreover these are finite type invariants whose order coincides with the order in the perturbative expansion. Together they combine to give a universal Vassiliev invariant.
We show that the number of homomorphisms from a knot group to a finite group $G$ cannot be a Vassiliev invariant, unless it is constant on the set of $(2,2p+1)$ torus knots. In several cases, such as when $G$ is a dihedral or symmetric group, this implies that the number of homomorphisms is not a Vassiliev invariant.
Using properties of ordered exponentials and the definition of the Drinfeld associator as a monodromy operator for the Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov equations, we prove that the analytic and the combinatorial definitions of the universal Vassiliev invariants of links are equivalent.
We show how to construct, starting from a quasi-Hopf algebra, or quasi-quantum group, invariants of knots and links. In some cases, these invariants give rise to invariants of the three-manifolds obtained by surgery along these links. This happens for a finite-dimensional quasi-quantum group, whose definition involves a finite group $G$, and a 3-cocycle $\om$, which was first studied by Dijkgraaf, Pasquier and Roche. We treat this example in more detail, and argue that in this case the invariants agree with the partition function of the topological field theory of Dijkgraaf and Witten depending on the same data $G, \,\om$.