A statistical approach to knot confinement via persistent homology

Daniele Celoria, Barbara I. Mahler

Published 2021-08-06Version 1

In this paper we study how randomly generated knots occupy a volume of space using topological methods. To this end, we consider the evolution of the first homology of an immersed metric neighbourhood of a knot's embedding for growing radii. Specifically, we extract features from the persistent homology of the Vietoris-Rips complexes built from point clouds associated to knots. Statistical analysis of our data shows the existence of increasing correlations between geometric quantities associated to the embedding and persistent homology based features, as a function of the knots' lengths. We further study the variation of these correlations for different knot types. Finally, this framework also allows us to define a simple notion of deviation from ideal configurations of knots.