On Chern-Simons theory with an inhomogeneous gauge group and BF theory knot invariants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We study the Chern-Simons topological quantum field theory with an inhomogeneous gauge group, a non-semi-simple group obtained from a semisimple one by taking its semidirect product with its Lie algebra. We find that the standard knot observable (i.e., trace of the holonomy along the knot) essentially vanishes, and yet, the non-semi-simplicity of the gauge group allows us to consider a class of unorthodox observables which breaks gauge invariance at one point and leads to a nontrivial theory on long knots in R3. We have two main morals. (1) In the non-semi-simple case there is more to observe in Chern-Simons theory. There might be other interesting non-semi-simple gauge groups to study in this context beyond our example. (2) In the case of an inhomogeneous gauge group, we find that Chern-Simons theory with the unorthodox observable is actually the same as three-dimensional BF theory with the Cattaneo-Cotta-Ramusino-Martellini knot observable. This leads to a simplification of their results and enables us to generalize and solve a problem they posed regarding the relation between BF theory and the Alexander-Conway polynomial. We prove that the most general knot invariant coming from pure BF topological quantum field theory is in the algebra generated by the coefficients of the Alexander-Conway polynomial.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".