Related papers: The Strong Slope Conjecture for twisted generalize…
The AJ conjecture, formulated by Garoufalidis, relates the A-polynomial and the colored Jones polynomial of a knot in the 3-sphere. It has been confirmed for all torus knots, some classes of two-bridge knots and pretzel knots, and most…
We show for an alternating knot the minimal boundary slope of an essential spanning surface is given by the signature plus twice the minimum degree of the Jones polynomial and the maximal boundary slope of an essential spanning surface is…
The colored HOMLFY polynomial is an important knot invariant depending on two variables $a$ and $q$. We give bounds on the degree in both $a$ and $q$ generalizing Morton's bounds \cite{Mo86} for the ordinary HOMFLY polynomial. Our bounds…
We prove the volume conjecture for any twist knots by using an equivalence relation, complex analysis, analytic continuation, and function of several complex variables on the basis of colored Jones polynomials.
In this paper, the volume conjecture for double twist knots are proved. The main tool is the complexified tetrahedron and the associated $\mathrm{SL}(2, \mathbb{C})$ representation of the fundamental group. A complexified tetrahedron is a…
We investigate the coefficients of the highest and lowest terms (also called the head and the tail) of the colored Jones polynomial and show that they stabilize for alternating links and for adequate links. To do this we apply techniques…
We propose a version of the volume conjecture that would relate a certain limit of the colored Jones polynomials of a knot to the volume function defined by a representation of the fundamental group of the knot complement to the special…
Kalfagianni and Lee found two-sided bounds for the crosscap number of an alternating link in terms of certain coefficients of the Jones polynomial. We show here that we can find similar two-sided bounds for the crosscap number of Conway…
We show that colored Khovanov homology detects classes of essential surfaces as a direct analogue of the slope conjectures for the colored Jones polynomial. We do this by identifying certain generators of the colored Khovanov chain complex…
A technique to calculate the colored Jones polynomials of satellite knots, illustrated by the Whitehead doubles of knots, is presented. Then we prove the volume conjecture for Whitehead doubles of a family of torus knots and show some…
We study relationships between the colored Jones polynomial and the A-polynomial of a knot. We establish for a large class of 2-bridge knots the AJ conjecture (of Garoufalidis) that relates the colored Jones polynomial and the A-polynomial.…
The coefficients of twisted Alexander polynomials of a knot induce regular functions of the $SL_2(\mathbb{C})$-character variety. We prove that the function of the highest degree has a finite value at an ideal point which gives a minimal…
The doubling conjecture predicts that a manifold admits positive scalar curvature with mean convex boundary if and only if its double admits positive scalar curvature. We show that it holds true for manifolds where the inclusion of the…
This paper is a brief overview of recent results by the authors relating colored Jones polynomials to geometric topology. The proofs of these results appear in the papers [arXiv:1002.0256] and [arXiv:1108.3370], while this survey focuses on…
We give a simple sufficient condition for a spun-normal surface in an ideal triangulation to be incompressible, namely that it is a vertex surface with non-empty boundary which has a quadrilateral in each tetrahedron. While this condition…
We show that after stabilizations of opposite parity and braid isotopy, any two braids in the same topological link type cobound embedded annuli. We use this to prove the generalized Jones conjecture relating the braid index and algebraic…
This is an introduction to the Volume Conjecture and its generalizations for nonexperts. The Volume Conjecture states that a certain limit of the colored Jones polynomial of a knot would give the volume of its complement. If we deform the…
We give a slope equality for fibered surfaces whose general fiber is a smooth plane curve. As a corollary, we prove a "strong" Durfee-type inequality for isolated hypersurface surface singularities, which implies Durfee's strong conjecture…
The Volume conjecture claims that the hyperbolic Volume of a knot is determined by the colored Jones polynomial. The purpose of this article is to show a Volume-ish theorem for alternating knots in terms of the Jones polynomial, rather than…
Whitehead doubles provide a plethora of examples of knots that are topologically slice but not smoothly slice. We discuss the problem of the Whitehead double of the Figure 8 knot and survey commonly used techniques to obstructing sliceness.…