Floer homology and non-fibered knot detection
Abstract
We prove for the first time that knot Floer homology and Khovanov homology can detect non-fibered knots, and that HOMFLY homology detects infinitely many such knots; these theories were previously known to detect a mere six knots, all fibered. These results rely on our main technical theorem, which gives a complete classification of genus-1 knots in the 3-sphere whose knot Floer homology in the top Alexander grading is 2-dimensional. We discuss applications of this classification to problems in Dehn surgery which are carried out in two sequels. These include a proof that -surgery characterizes infinitely many knots, generalizing results of Gabai from his 1987 resolution of the Property R Conjecture.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2208.03307,
title = {Floer homology and non-fibered knot detection},
author = {John A. Baldwin and Steven Sivek},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.03307},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
66 pages, 29 figures; v2: many minor changes throughout