English

Divisibility of Lee's class and its relation with Rasmussen's invariant

Geometric Topology 2025-10-08 v3

Abstract

Lee homology (a variant of Khovanov homology) over Q\mathbb{Q} possesses the "canonical generators" as its basis. The generators (Lee's classes) [α(D,o)][\alpha(D, o)] are constructed combinatorially from an oriented link diagram DD, one for each alternative orientation oo on DD. Let RR be an integral domain. There exists a family of link homology theory {Hc(;R)}cR\{ H_c(-; R) \}_{c \in R}, where Khovanov's theory corresponds to c=0c = 0 and Lee's theory corresponds to c=2c = 2. For each cR0c \in R \setminus 0, Lee's classes [α(D,o)][\alpha(D, o)] can be defined as elements in Hc(D;R)H_c(D; R), but when cc is not invertible then they do not form a basis; in fact they are divisible by cc-powers. We define the cc-divisibility kc(D)k_c(D) of [α(D,o)][\alpha(D, o)] with oo the given orientation of DD. For any link LL and its diagram DD, we prove that sˉc(L):=2kc(D)+w(D)r(D)+1\bar{s}_c(L) := 2k_c(D) + w(D) - r(D) + 1 is a link invariant, where ww is the writhe, and rr is the number of Seifert circles. We pose the question whether sˉc\bar{s}_c coincides with Rasmussen's ss-invariant. There are several evidences that support the affirmative answer. For instance, sˉc\bar{s}_c is a link concordance invariant, and the Milnor conjecture can be reproved using sˉc\bar{s}_c. Also for the special case (R,c)=(Q[h],h)(R, c) = (\mathbb{Q}[h], h), our sˉc\bar{s}_c actually coincides with ss as knot invariants.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1812.10258,
  title  = {Divisibility of Lee's class and its relation with Rasmussen's invariant},
  author = {Taketo Sano},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.10258},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

This paper is based on the master's thesis submitted to the Graduate School of Mathematical Sciences, the University of Tokyo