Nullification of Torus knots and links

摘要

It is known that a knot/link can be nullified, i.e. can be made into the trivial knot/link, by smoothing some crossings in a projection diagram of the knot/link. The minimum number of such crossings to be smoothed in order to nullify the knot/link is called the nullification number. In this paper we investigate the nullification numbers of a particular knot family, namely the family of torus knots and links.