Twisted Novikov homology and circle-valued Morse theory for knots and links (Q2574462)

The Morse-Novikov number \(\text{MN}(L)\) of a smooth link \(L\) in \(S^3\) is defined to be the minimum number of critical points of a circle-valued function (with nice behavior on a tubular neighborhood of \(L\)) on the link complement. A lower bound for \(\text{MN}(L)\) is provided by Novikov homology. In this paper the authors introduce an invariant, called twisted Novikov homology, that gives a better lower bound than usual Novikov homology. Like Novikov homology, it is a \(\mathbb Z(t)\)-module, but depends on a given representation of the fundamental group: this allows the authors to apply non-abelian homological algebra. The authors consider several examples where the twisted Novikov homology yields better estimates of \(MN(L)\) than the usual Novikov homology.