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On Braids, Branched Covers And Transverse Invariants, Jose Hector Ceniceros

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this work, we present a brief survey of knot theory supported by contact 3-manifolds. We focus on transverse knots and explore different ways of studying transverse knots. We define a new family of transverse invariants, this is accomplished by considering $n$-fold cyclic branched covers branched along a transverse knot and we then extend the definition of the BRAID invariant $t$ defined in cite{BVV} to the lift of the transverse knot. We call the new invariant the lift of the BRAID invariant and denote it by $t_n$. We then go on to show that $t_n$ satisfies a comultiplication formula and …