Some petal diagrams of the unknot are hard

Abstract

A petal diagram of a knot is a projection with a single multi-crossing and no nested loops; it is encoded by a permutation of the heights of the strands through the multi-crossing. Colton, Glover, Hughes and Sandberg proved a Reidemeister-type theorem for petal diagrams: two petal permutations represent the same knot if and only if they are related by trivial petal additions and deletions and by crossing exchanges. We ask whether every petal diagram of the unknot can be reduced to the one-petal diagram without ever increasing the number of petals, in analogy with Dynnikov's monotonic simplification theorem for rectangular diagrams. By an exhaustive, certified computer search we show that this is true for diagrams with at most 7 petals and false for 9 petals. Of the 40320 petal diagrams with 9 petals, 24992 represent the unknot, and exactly 108 of them are hard: none of them admits a crossing exchange or a trivial petal deletion, even if two natural petal-number-preserving symmetries are allowed. Up to these symmetries and mirror image there are three hard diagrams. Two of them can be untangled by passing through 11 petals; the third cannot be untangled through diagrams with at most 11 petals, but can through 13. We explain why the phenomenon differs from the rectangular case: a petal diagram is an arc presentation whose cyclic order of pages is determined by the order of its vertices on the binding, and no elementary move of Cromwell and Dynnikov preserves this rigid structure.