Study of certain isotopy classes of a finite collection of immersed circles without triple or higher intersections on closed oriented surfaces can be thought of as a planar analogue of virtual knot theory where the genus zero case corresponds to classical knot theory. Alexander and Markov theorems for the genus zero case are known where the role of groups is played by twin groups, a class of right angled Coxeter groups with only far commutativity relations. The purpose of this paper is to prove Alexander and Markov theorems for higher genus case where the role of groups is played by a new class of groups called virtual twin groups which extends twin groups in a natural way.

The authors are grateful to the anonymous referees for their detailed reports which have substantially improved the readability of the paper. Neha Nanda thanks IISER Mohali for the PhD Research Fellowship. Mahender Singh is supported by the Swarna Jayanti Fellowship grants DST/SJF/MSA-02/2018-19 and SB/SJF/2019-20.