Biquandle Coloring Invariants of Knotoids

Neslihan Gügümcü, Sam Nelson

Published 2018-03-30, updated 2019-02-26Version 2

In this paper, we consider biquandle colorings for knotoids in $\mathbb{R}^2$ or $S^2$ and we construct several coloring invariants for knotoids derived as enhancements of the biquandle counting invariant. We first enhance the biquandle counting invariant by using a matrix constructed by utilizing the orientation a knotoid diagram is endowed with. We generalize Niebrzydowski's biquandle longitude invariant for virtual long knots to obtain new invariants for knotoids. We show that biquandle invariants can detect mirror images of knotoids and show that our enhancements are proper in the sense that knotoids which are not distinguished by the counting invariant are distinguished by our enhancements.