Paper detail

New deformations on spherical curves and Östlund Conjecture

In 2018, Funakoshi, Hashizume, Ito, Kobayashi, and Murai used a deformation of spherical curves called deformation type $α$. Then, it was showed that if two spherical curves $P$ and $P'$ are equivalent under the relation consisting of deformations of type RI and type RIII up to ambient isotopy, and satisfy certain conditions, then $P'$ is obtained from $P$ by a finite sequence of deformations of type $α$. In this paper, we introduce a new type of deformations of spherical curves, called deformation of type $β$. The main result of this paper is: Two spherical curves $P$ and $P'$ are equivalent under (possibly empty) deformations of type RI and a single deformation of type RIII up to ambient isotopy if and only if reduced(P) and reduced(P') are transformed each other by exactly one deformation which is of type RIII, type $α$, or type $β$ up to ambient isotopy, where reduced(Q) is the spherical curve which does not contain a $1$-gon obtained from a spherical curve $Q$ by applying deformations of type RI up to ambient isotopy.