ON EXTREME COEFFICIENTS OF THE JONES–KAUFFMAN POLYNOMIAL FOR VIRTUAL LINKS

Abstract

An important problem of knot theory is to find or estimate the extreme coefficients of the Jones–Kauffman polynomial for (virtual) links with a given number of classical crossings. This problem has been studied by Morton and Bae [1] and Manchón [11] for the case of classical links. It turns out that the general case can be reduced to the case when the extreme coefficient function is expressible in terms of chord diagrams (previous authors consider only d-diagrams which correspond to the classical case [9]). We find the maximal absolute values for generic chord diagrams, thus, for generic virtual knots. Also we consider the "next" coefficient of the Jones–Kauffman polynomial in terms of framed chord diagrams and find its maximal value for a given number of chords. These two functions on chord diagrams are of their own interest because there are related to the Vassiliev invariants of classical knots and J-invariants of planar curves, as mentioned in [10].