The expansion of a chord diagram and the Tutte polynomial

A chord diagram is a set of chords of a circle such that no pair of chords has a common endvertex. A chord diagram $E$ is called nonintersecting if $E$ contains no crossing. For a chord diagram $E$ having a crossing $S=\{x_1{x}_3,x_2{x}_4\}$, the expansion of $E$ with respect to $S$ is to replace $E$ with $E_1=(E?S)\cup \{x_2{x}_3,x_4{x}_1\}$ or $E_2=(E?S)\cup \{x_1{x}_2,x_3{x}_4\}$. For a chord diagram $E$, let $f\left(E\right)$ be the chord expansion number of $E$, which is defined as the cardinality of the multiset of all nonintersecting chord diagrams generated from $E$ with a finite sequence of expansions.In this paper, it is shown that the chord expansion number $f\left(E\right)$ equals the value of the Tutte polynomial at the point $(2,?1)$ for the interlace graph $G_E$ corresponding to $E$. The chord expansion number of a complete multipartite chord diagram is also studied. An extended abstract of the paper was published (Nakamigawa and Sakuma, 2017) 13].