Knot Diagrams of Treewidth Two

Abstract

In this paper, we study knot diagrams for which the underlying graph has treewidth two. We give a linear time algorithm for the following problem: given a knot diagram of treewidth two, does it represent the unknot? We also show that for a link diagram of treewidth two we can test in linear time if it represents the unlink. From the algorithm, it follows that a diagram of the unknot of treewidth 2 can always be reduced to the trivial diagram with at most $n$ (un)twist and (un)poke Reidemeister moves.

19 pages, 16 figures. The first version had erroneously three subsections repeated; the updated version avoids this mistake