Balloons and Hoops and Their Universal Finite Type Invariant, Bf Theory, and an Ultimate Alexander Invariant

Balloons are two-dimensional spheres. Hoops are one dimensional loops. Knotted Balloons and Hoops (KBH) in 4-space behave much like the first and second homotopy groups of a topological space — hoops can be composed as in π1, balloons as in π2, and hoops “act” on balloons as π1 acts on π2. We observe that ordinary knots and tangles in 3-space map into KBH in 4-space and become amalgams of both balloons and hoops. We give an ansatz for a tree and wheel (that is, free-Lie and cyclic word) -valued invariant ζ of (ribbon) KBHs in terms of the said compositions and action and we explain its relationship with finite type invariants. We speculate that ζ is a complete evaluation of the BF topological quantum field theory in 4D. We show that a certain “reduction and repackaging” of ζ is an “ultimate Alexander invariant” that contains the Alexander polynomial (multivariable, if you wish), has extremely good composition properties, is evaluated in a topologically meaningful way, and is least-wasteful in a computational sense. If you believe in categorification, that should be a wonderful playground. Web resources for this paper are available at [Web/]:=http://www.math.toronto.edu/~drorbn/papers/KBH/, including an electronic version, source files, computer programs, lecture handouts and lecture videos; one of the handouts is attached at the end of this paper. Throughout this paper we follow the notational conventions and notations outlined in Section 10.5.