A Legendrian Thurston-Bennequin bound from Khovanov homology (Q813180): Difference between revisions

The Khovanov homology of an oriented link \( L\) is a bigraded abelian group \(HKh^{*,*}(L)\). Put \(Kh_{L}(q,t)=\sum \dim_{\mathbb Q}(HKh^{i,j}(L)\otimes \mathbb Q)q^it^j\) to be the two variable Poincaré polynomial. Recall that \(Kh_{L}(q,-1)=(q+q^{-1})V_{L}(q^2)\) where \(V_{L}\) is the Jones polynomial. Put \(\overline{tb}(L)\) to be the maximal Thurston Bennequin number for a Legendrian link of topological type \(L\) in the standard contact \(\mathbb R^3\). The author shows that for any link \(L\) \(\overline {tb}(L)\leq\min\{k\mid\bigoplus_{i-j=k}KHh^{i,j}(L)\neq 0\}\) and that \(\overline{tb}(L)\leq\min\deg_q Kh_{L}(q, t/q)\) what he calls the strong and the weak Khovanov bounds, respectively. He shows that both weak and strong Khovanov bounds are sharp for alternating links. If \(L\) is nonsplit and alternating he proves that \(\overline{tb}(L)=\min\deg_q V_{L}(q)+\sigma(L)/2-1\), where \(\sigma(L)\) is the signature.