ON ROBERTS’ PROOF OF THE TURAEV-WALKER THEOREM

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the beautiful idea of Justin Roberts [7] (see also [8]) to re-obtain the Turaev-Viro invariants [11] via skein theory, and re-prove elementarily the Turaev-Walker theorem [9], [10], [13]. We do this by exploiting the presentation of 3-manifolds introduced in [1], [4]. Our presentation supports in a very natural way a formal implementation of Roberts’ idea. More specifically, what we show is how to explicitly extract from an o-graph (the object by which we represent a manifold, see below), one of the framed links in S3 which Roberts uses in the construction of his invariant, and a planar diagrammatic representation of such a link. This implies that the proofs of invariance and equality with the Turaev-Viro invariant can be carried out in a completely “algebraic” way, in terms of a planar diagrammatic calculus which does not require any interpretation of 3-dimensional figures. In particular, when proving the “term-by-term” equality of the expansion of the Roberts invariant with the state sum which gives the Turaev-Viro invariant, we simultaneously apply several times the “fusion rule” (which is formally defined, strictly speaking, only in diagrammatic terms), showing that the “braiding and twisting” which a priori may exist on tetrahedra is globally dispensable. In our point of view the success of this formal “algebraic” approach witnesses a certain efficiency of our presentation of 3-manifolds via o-graphs. In this work we will widely use recoupling theory which was very clearly exposed in [2], and therefore we will avoid recalling notations. Actually, for the purpose of stating and proving our results we will need to slightly extend the class of trivalent ribbon diagrams on which the bracket can be computed. We also address the reader to the references quoted in [2], in particular for the fundamental contributions of Lickorish to this area. In our approach it is more natural to consider invariants of compact 3-manifolds with non-empty boundary. The case of closed 3-manifolds is included by introducing a correction factor corresponding to boundary spheres, as explained in §2. Our main result is actually an extension to manifolds with boundary of the Turaev-Walker theorem: we show that the Turaev-Viro invariant of such a manifold coincides (up to a factor which depends on the Euler characteristic) with the Reshetikhin-Turaev-Witten invariant of the manifold mirrored in its boundary.