Clasp-pass moves on knots, links and spatial graphs

Abstract

A clasp-pass move is a local move on oriented links introduced by Habiro in 1993. He showed that two knots are transformed into each other by clasp-pass moves if and only if they have the same second coefficient of the Conway polynomial. We extend his classification to two-component links, three-component links, algebraically split links, and spatial embeddings of a planar graph that does not contain disjoint cycles. These are classified in terms of linking numbers, the second coefficient of the Conway polynomial, the Arf invariant, and the Milnor μ-invariant. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.