English

Skein traces from curve counting

Symplectic Geometry 2025-10-23 v1 High Energy Physics - Theory Geometric Topology Quantum Algebra

Abstract

Given a 3-manifold MM, and a branched cover arising from the projection of a Lagrangian 3-manifold LL in the cotangent bundle of MM to the zero-section, we define a map from the skein of MM to the skein of LL, via the skein-valued counting of holomorphic curves. When MM and LL 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 MM is a surface times an interval, and additionally specializing the HOMFLYPT skein to the gl(2)\mathfrak{gl}(2) skein on MM and the gl(1)\mathfrak{gl}(1) skein on LL, 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

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:58:41.784Z