Instanton 2-torsion and fibered knots
Abstract
We prove that the unreduced singular instanton homology has -torsion for any null-homologous fibered knot of genus in a closed -manifold except for . The main technical result is a formula of via sutured instanton theory, by which we can compare the dimensions of and . As a byproduct, we show that for a knot admitting lens space surgeries is determined by the Alexander polynomial, while some special cases of torus knots have been previously studied by many people. Another byproduct is that the next-to-top Alexander grading summand of instanton knot homology is non-vanishing when has unknotting number one, which generalizes the Baldwin--Sivek's result in the fibered case. Finally, we discuss the relation to the Heegaard Floer theory.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.24206,
title = {Instanton 2-torsion and fibered knots},
author = {Deeparaj Bhat and Zhenkun Li and Fan Ye},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.24206},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
21 pages, 6 figures; Comments are welcome