Yang-Baxter operators need quantum entanglement to distinguish knots

Any solution to the Yang-Baxter equation yields a family of representations
of braid groups. Under certain conditions, identified by Turaev, the
appropriately normalized trace of these representations yields a link
invariant. Any Yang-Baxter solution can be interpreted as a two-qudit quantum
gate. Here we show that if this gate is non-entangling, then the resulting
invariant of knots is trivial. We thus obtain a general connection between
topological entanglement and quantum entanglement, as suggested by Kauffman et
al.