Ineffective sets and the region crossing change operation

Abstract

Region crossing change (RCC) is an operation on link diagrams in which all crossings incident to a selected region are changed. Two diagrams are called RCC-equivalent if one can be transformed to the other via a sequence of RCCs. RCC is an unknotting operation but not an unlinking operation. A set of regions of a diagram is called ineffective if RCCs at every region in that set have no net effect on the crossings of the diagram. The main result of this paper is a construction of the complete collection of ineffective sets for any link diagram. This involves a combination of linear algebraic and diagrammatic techniques including a generalization of checkerboard shading called tricoloring. Using this construction of ineffective sets, we provide sharp upper bounds on the maximum number of RCCs needed to transform between RCC-equivalent knot diagrams and reduced 2- and 3-component link diagrams with fixed underlying projections.