The Dual Canonical Basis in the Spin Representation via the Temperley-Lieb Algebra

The spin representation $(\mathbb C^2)^{\otimes n}$ has a dual canonical basis introduced by Lusztig that is important in many areas of algebra, geometry, and physics. Khovanov observed that a portion of the dual canonical basis can be viewed diagrammatically through the Temperley-Lieb algebra. We provide a simpler construction that we generalize to the entire dual canonical basis, and write explicit formulas to compute the dual canonical basis, and thus the canonical basis of the spherical module, as a byproduct. We reprove some of Khovanov's results using our new perspective. Furthermore, we use the Hecke algebra to reprove the fact that the canonical basis is indeed dual to the dual canonical basis, leading to similar results about the canonical basis in $\mathcal M^*$ and $\mathcal N^*$, the dual spaces to the spherical and aspherical modules, as a byproduct. Finally, we present an alternative axiomatic definition of the canonical basis using diagrams.