Quantum invariants of framed links from ternary self-distributive cohomology

Abstract

The ribbon cocycle invariant is defined by means of a partition function using ternary cohomology of self-distributive structures (TSD) and colorings of ribbon diagrams of a framed link, following the same paradigm introduced by Carter, Jelsovsky, Kamada, Langfor and Saito in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 2003;355(10):3947-89, for the quandle cocycle invariant. In this article we show that the ribbon cocycle invariant is a quantum invariant. We do so by constructing a ribbon category from a TSD set whose twisting and braiding morphisms entail a given TSD $2$-cocycle. Then we show that the quantum invariant naturally associated to this braided category coincides with the cocycle invariant. We generalize this construction to symmetric monoidal categories and provide classes of examples obtained from Hopf monoids and Lie algebras. We further introduce examples from Hopf-Frobenius algebras, objects studied in quantum computing.