Discrete thickness

We investigate the relationship between a discrete version of thickness and its smooth counterpart. These discrete energies are deffned on equilateral polygons with n vertices. It will turn out that the smooth ropelength, which is the scale invariant quotient of length divided by thickness, is the Γ-limit of the discrete ropelength for n → ∞, regarding the topology induced by the Sobolev norm ‖ · ‖ W1,∞(S1,ℝd). This result directly implies the convergence of almost minimizers of the discrete energies in a fixed knot class to minimizers of the smooth energy.Moreover,we show that the unique absolute minimizer of inverse discrete thickness is the regular n-gon