Enumeration of chord diagrams via topological recursion and quantum curve techniques

Abstract

In this paper we consider the enumeration of orientable and non-orientable chord diagrams. We show that this enumeration is encoded in appropriate expectation values of the $\beta$-deformed Gaussian and RNA matrix models. We evaluate these expectation values by means of the $\beta$-deformed topological recursion, and - independently - using properties of quantum curves. We show that both these methods provide efficient and systematic algorithms for counting of chord diagrams with a given genus, number of backbones and number of chords.