A principle for ideal torus knots

We study simple, knotted and linked torus windings that are made of tubes of finite thickness. Knots which have the shortest rope length are often denoted ideal structures. Conventionally, the ideal structure are found by rope shortening routines. It is shown that alternatively they can be directly determined as maximally rotated structures. In many cases these structures are also zero-twist structures i.e. structures that neither rotate one or the other way under strain. We use this principle to implement rapid numerical calculations of the ideal structures and subsequently quantify them by their aspect ratio. The results are compared with the aspect ratios of biological torus molecules.