The KW equations and the Nahm pole boundary condition with knots (Q2208311)

In this detailed technical paper the authors extend further their previous analysis of the Kapustin-Witten (KW) equations with Nahm pole boundary condition now adapted to general 4-manifolds-with-boundary such that the boundary-3-manifold contains a knot or more generally a link. The motivation is a conjecture of the second author that the coefficients of the Laurent expansion of the Jones polynomial of a link \(L\subset {\mathbb R}^3\) arise by counting solutions of the KW equations on the half-space \({\mathbb R}^4_+\) obeying a generalized Nahm pole boundary condition on \(\partial {\mathbb R}^4_+={\mathbb R}^3\supset L\) i.e. the Nahm pole boundary condition generalized to be compatible with the extra information of containing a link on the boundary. Roughly this means to prescribe further singularities in the Higgs field part of the KW pair along each link component while the connection part is continuous up to the boundary as before. The conjecture is important because it is well-known that computing the Jones polynomial of a link is an exponentially difficult problem in terms of e.g. the crossing number of any plane diagram of the link.