English

Instanton dimensions of knot surgeries over arbitrary fields

Geometric Topology 2025-11-25 v1

Abstract

Suppose KS3K \subset S^3 is a knot and suppose pp and qq are co-prime integers with q1q\ge 1. For any field K\mathbb{K}, we establish a dimension formula for the framed instanton homology of knot surgeries: dimI(Sp/q3(K);K)=qrK(K)+pqνK(K) \dim I^\sharp(S^3_{p/q}(K); \mathbb{K}) = q \cdot r_{\mathbb{K}}(K) + |p - q \cdot \nu^\sharp_{\mathbb{K}}(K)| for certain integers rK(K)r_{\mathbb{K}}(K) and νK(K)\nu^\sharp_{\mathbb{K}}(K), except possibly when p/q=νK(K)p/q = \nu^\sharp_{\mathbb{K}}(K) and νK(K)\nu^\sharp_{\mathbb{K}}(K) is even. This formula generalizes the result of Baldwin--Sivek from the case K=C\mathbb{K} = \mathbb{C} to arbitrary fields. Based on the result for K=Z/2\mathbb{K} = \mathbb{Z}/2, we obtain that Sp/q3(K)S^3_{p/q}(K) is not SU(2)SU(2)-abelian for any knot KK other than the unknot and the right-handed trefoil whenever p/q[0,6)p/q \in [0,6) and p{ae,2ae}p \in \{ a^e, 2a^e \} for some prime number aa and natural number ee, thereby extending existing results for p/q[0,5]p/q \in [0,5] and p=aep = a^e. A byproduct of the techniques developed in this paper is that we generalize the distance-two surgery exact triangle by Culler--Daemi--Xie and Daemi--Miller-Eismeier--Lidman from Z/2\mathbb{Z}/2 coefficients to any coefficient ring.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.17877,
  title  = {Instanton dimensions of knot surgeries over arbitrary fields},
  author = {Zhenkun Li and Fan Ye},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.17877},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

39 pages, no figures. Comments are welcome

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:49:55.102Z