Bicharacter twists of quantum groups

Abstract: We apply the general construction of a twist of bigraded Hopf algebras by skew bicharacters to obtain two-parameter quantum groups in the Drinfeld-Jimbo, new Drinfeld (for affine types), and FRT (for both finite and affine) presentations from their standard one-parameter versions. This yields new elementary proofs of the fundamental results on two-parameter quantum groups that appeared in the literature over the last two decades, and also leads to natural generalizations in the super and multiparameter cases.