Quandle colorings vs. biquandle colorings

Abstract

Biquandles are generalizations of quandles. As well as quandles, biquandles give us many invariants for oriented classical/virtual/surface links. Some invariants derived from biquandles are known to be stronger than those from quandles for virtual links. However, we have not found an essentially refined invariant for classical/surface links so far. In this paper, we give an explicit one-to-one correspondence between biquandle colorings and quandle colorings for classical/surface links. We also show that biquandle homotopy invariants and quandle homotopy invariants are equivalent. As a byproduct, we can interpret biquandle cocycle invariants in terms of shadow quandle cocycle invariants.