Annular Links from Thompson's Group $T$

Abstract

In 2014 Jones showed how to associate links in the $3$-sphere to elements of Thompson's group $F$. We provide an analogue of this program for annular links and Thompson's group $T$. The main result is that any edge-signed graph embedded in the annulus is the Tait graph of an annular link built from an element of $T$. In analogy to the work of Aiello and Conti, we also show that the coefficients of certain unitary representations of $T$ recover the Jones polynomial of annular links.