On the Functors Associated with Beaded Open Jacobi Diagrams

Abstract

Morphisms in the linear category $\mathbf{A}$ of Jacobi diagrams in handlebodies give rise to interesting contravariant functors on the category $\mathbf{gr}$ of finitely generated free groups, encoding part of the composition structure of the category $\mathbf{A}$. These functors correspond, via an equivalence of categories given by Powell, to functors given by beaded open Jacobi diagrams. We study the polynomiality of these functors and whether they are outer functors. These results are inspired by and generalize previous results obtained by Katada.