English

Immersed curves in Khovanov homology

Geometric Topology 2019-12-18 v2 Quantum Algebra Symplectic Geometry

Abstract

We give a geometric interpretation of Bar-Natan's universal invariant for the class of tangles in the 3-ball with four ends: we associate with such 4-ended tangles TT multicurves BN~(T)\widetilde{\operatorname{BN}}(T), that is, collections of immersed curves with local systems in the 4-punctured sphere. These multicurves are tangle invariants up to homotopy of the underlying curves and equivalence of the local systems. They satisfy a gluing theorem which recovers the reduced Bar-Natan homology of links in terms of wrapped Lagrangian Floer theory. Furthermore, we use BN~(T)\widetilde{\operatorname{BN}}(T) to define two immersed curve invariants Kh~(T)\widetilde{\operatorname{Kh}}(T) and Kh(T)\operatorname{Kh}(T), which satisfy similar gluing theorems that recover reduced and unreduced Khovanov homology of links, respectively. As a first application, we prove that Conway mutation preserves reduced Bar-Natan homology over the field with two elements and Rasmussen's ss-invariant over any field. As a second application, we give a geometric interpretation of Rozansky's categorification of the two-stranded Jones-Wenzl projector. This allows us to define a module structure on reduced Bar-Natan and Khovanov homologies of infinitely twisted knots, generalizing a result by Benheddi.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.14584,
  title  = {Immersed curves in Khovanov homology},
  author = {Artem Kotelskiy and Liam Watson and Claudius Zibrowius},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.14584},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

95 pages, 62 figures. Uses TikZ and PSTricks, also colour. Version 2: minor edits throughout, including corrected discussion around some of the background material in Section 3