Electric group for knots and links

Abstract

In 2014 Andrey Perfiliev introduced the so-called electric invariant for non-oriented knots. This invariant was motivated by using Kirchhoff's laws for the dual graph of the knot diagram. Later, in 2020, Anastasiya Galkina generalised this invariant and defined the electric group for non-oriented knots. Both works were never written and published. In the present paper we describe a simple and general approach to the electric group for oriented knots and links. Each homomorphism from the electric group to an arbitrary finite group can be described by a proper colouring of the diagram. This colouring assigns an element of the group to each crossing of the diagram, and the proper conditions correspond to the areas of the diagram. In the second part of the paper we introduce tensor network invariants for coloured links. The idea of these invariants is very close to quantum invariants for classical links.