What makes a given knot's unlinking pathway more likely to appear in certain topological decay processes—from DNA to vortex dynamics? Here, the authors introduce a measure of topological complexity as distance in a suitably defined knot polynomial space, allowing them to quantify the probability of decay pathways as geodesic flows in this space.
- Xin Liu
- Renzo L. Ricca
- Xin-Fei Li
