2-Tangles
| dc.creator | Baez, John C. | |
| dc.creator | Langford, Laurel | |
| dc.date | 1997-03-18 | |
| dc.date | 1998-05-31 | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-07-07T09:05:00Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2026-07-07T09:05:00Z | |
| dc.description | Just as links may be algebraically described as certain morphisms in the category of tangles, compact surfaces smoothly embedded in R^4 may be described as certain 2-morphisms in the 2-category of `2-tangles in 4 dimensions'. In this announcement we give a purely algebraic characterization of the 2-category of unframed unoriented 2-tangles in 4 dimensions as the `free semistrict braided monoidal 2-category with duals on one unframed self-dual object'. A forthcoming paper will contain a proof of this result using the movie moves of Carter, Rieger and Saito. We comment on how one might use this result to construct invariants of 2-tangles. | |
| dc.description | 12 pages LaTeX, 3 encapsulated Postscript figures, corrected definition of "unframed object" | |
| dc.identifier | https://arxiv.org/abs/q-alg/9703033 | |
| dc.identifier | http://arxiv.org/abs/q-alg/9703033 | |
| dc.identifier | Lett. Math. Phys. 43 (1998), 187-197. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/149583 | |
| dc.subject | Quantum Algebra | |
| dc.title | 2-Tangles | |
| dc.type | text |