Topological Entanglement of Polymers and Chern-Simons Field Theory
  In recent times some interesting field theoretical descriptions of the statistical mechanics of entangling polymers have been proposed by various authors. In these approaches, a single test polymer fluctuating in a background of static polymers or in a lattice of obstacles is considered. The extension to the case in which the configurations of two or more polymers become non-static is not straightforward unless their trajectories are severely constrained. In this paper we present another approach, based on Chern--Simons field theory, which is able to describe the topological entanglements of two fluctuating polymers in terms of gauge fields and second quantized replica fields. 
Franco Ferrari (LPTHE, U. Paris VI), Ignazio Lazzizzera (U. Trento and   INFN)