Unexpected local minima in the width complexes for knots

Abstract

In "Width complexes for knots and 3-manifolds," Jennifer Schultens defines the width complex for a knot in order to understand the different positions a knot can occupy in the 3-sphere and the isotopies between these positions. She poses several questions about these width complexes; in particular, she asks whether the width complex for a knot can have local minima that are not global minima. In this paper, we find an embedding of the unknot that is a local minimum but not a global minimum in its width complex. We use this embedding to exhibit for any knot K infinitely many distinct local minima that are not global minima of the width complex for K.