Twisted link theory

Abstract

We introduce stable equivalence classes of oriented links in orientable three-manifolds that are orientation $I$–bundles over closed but not necessarily orientable surfaces. We call these twisted virtual links and show that they subsume the virtual knots introduced by L Kauffman and the projective links introduced by Yu V Drobotukhina. We show that these links have unique minimal genus three-manifolds. We use link diagrams to define an extension of the Jones polynomial for these links and show that this polynomial fails to distinguish two-colorable links over nonorientable surfaces from non-two-colorable virtual links.