Construction of weaving and polycatenane motifs from periodic tilings of the plane

Abstract

Doubly periodic weaves and polycatenanes embedded in the thickened Euclidean plane are three-dimensional complex entangled structures whose topological properties can be encoded in any generating cell of its infinite planar representation. Such a periodic cell, called motif, is a specific type of link diagram embedded on a torus consisting of essential simple closed curves for weaves, or null-homotopic for polycatenanes. In this paper, we introduce a methodology to construct such motifs using the concept of polygonal link transformations. This approach generalizes to the Euclidean plane existing methods to construct polyhedral links in the three-dimensional space. Then, we will state our main result which allows one to predict the type of motif that can be built from a given planar periodic tiling and a chosen polygonal link method.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figure