Title of Paper:On Tetrahedralisations Containing Knotted and Linked Line Segments

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Date of Publication:2017-01-01

Included Journals:EI、CPCI-S

Volume:203

Page Number:323-335

Abstract:This paper considers a set of twisted line segments in 3d such that they form a knot (a closed curve) or a link of two closed curves. Such line segments appear on the boundary of a family of 3d indecomposable polyhedra (like the SchOnhardt polyhedron) whose interior cannot be tetrahedralised without additional vertices added. On the other hand, a 3d (non-convex) polyhedron whose boundary contains such line segments may still be decomposable as long as the twist is not too large. It is therefore interesting to consider the question: when there exists a tetrahedralisation contains a given set of knotted or linked line segments?
   In this paper, we studied a simplified question with the assumption that all vertices of the line segments are in convex position. It is straightforward to show that no tetrahedralisation of 6 vertices (the three-line-segments case) can contain a trefoil knot. Things become interesting when the number of line segments increases. Since it is necessary to create new interior edges to form a tetrahedralisation. We provided a detailed analysis for the case of a set of 4 line segments. This leads to a crucial condition on the orientation of pairs of new interior edges which determines whether this set is decomposable or not. We then prove a new theorem about the decomposability for a set of n (n >= 3) knotted or linked line segments. This theorem implies that the family of polyhedra generalised from the Schonhardt polyhedron by Rambau [1] are all indecomposable. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.