Khovanov module and the detection of unlinks (Q372696)

The Jones polynomial is a fascinating but still rather poorly understood invariant of knots and links. For example it is still not known whether or not the Jones polynomial detects the unknot.NEWLINENEWLINEThe Jones polynomial was `categorified' by \textit{M. Khovanov}. More precisely, in [Duke Math. J. 101, No. 3, 359--426 (2000; Zbl 0960.57005)] he associated to a link a chain complex whose homology groups are bigraded and from which the Jones polynomial can be recovered by taking an appropriate Euler characteristic. \textit{P. B. Kronheimer} and \textit{T. S. Mrowka} [Publ. Math., Inst. Hautes Étud. Sci. 113, 97--208 (2011; Zbl 1241.57017)] related Khovanov homology to an invariant arising from instanton Floer homology and used this result to show that Khovanov homology detects the unknot. More precisely, they showed that a knot is trivial if and only if the total rank of the reduced Khovanov homology equals one.NEWLINENEWLINEIt is known that the Jones polynomial does not detect the unlink with two or more components. Also, it is known that the total rank of Khovanov homology does not detect the unlink with two or more components. In this paper the authors view the Khovanov homology of an \(n\)-component link as a module over \(\mathbb{F}_2[X_0,\dots,X_{n-1}]/(X_0^2,\dots,X_{n-1}^2)\), and they show that the Khovanov homology with this module structure in fact detects the unlink. This very interesting result is proved by relating the Khovanov homology of a link to the Heegaard Floer homology of the 2-fold branched cover of \(L\).