Skein traces from curve counting
Abstract
Given a 3-manifold , and a branched cover arising from the projection of a Lagrangian 3-manifold in the cotangent bundle of to the zero-section, we define a map from the skein of to the skein of , via the skein-valued counting of holomorphic curves. When and are products of surfaces and intervals, we show that wall crossings in the space of the branched covers obey a skein-valued lift of the Kontsevich-Soibelman wall-crossing formula. Holomorphic curves in cotangent bundles correspond to Morse flow graphs; in the case of branched double covers, this allows us to give an explicit formula for the the skein trace. After specializing to the case where is a surface times an interval, and additionally specializing the HOMFLYPT skein to the skein on and the skein on , we recover an existing prescription of Neitzke and Yan.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.19041,
title = {Skein traces from curve counting},
author = {Tobias Ekholm and Pietro Longhi and Sunghyuk Park and Vivek Shende},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.19041},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
78 pages, many figures