A survey on the Le-Murakami-Ohtsuki invariant for closed 3-manifolds

Abstract: We review the original approach to the Le-Murakami-Ohtsuki (LMO) invariant of closed 3-manifolds (as opposed to the later approach based on the Aarhus integral). Following the ideas of surgery presentation, we introduce a class of combinatorial structures, called Kirby structures, which we prove to yield multiplicative 3-manifold invariants. We illustrate this with the Reshetikhin-Turaev invariants. We then introduce a class of combinatorial structures, called pre-LMO structures, and prove that they give rise to Kirby structures. We show how the Kontsevich integral can be used to construct a pre-LMO structure. This yields two families of multiplicative 3-manifolds invariants ${\Omega_n^{\mathfrak{c}}}_{n\geq 1}$ and ${\Omega_n^{\mathfrak{d}}}_{n\geq 1}$. We review the elimination of redundant information in the latter family, leading to the construction of the LMO invariant. We also provide uniqueness results of some aspects of the LMO construction. The family of invariants ${\Omega_n^{\mathfrak{c}}}_{n\geq 1}$ is not discussed explicitly in the literature; whereas $\Omega_n^{\mathfrak{c}}$ enables one to recover $\Omega_n^{\mathfrak{d}}$ for any $n \geq 1$, we show that these invariants coincide for $n = 1$.