A Jones polynomial for braid-like isotopies of oriented links and its categorification (Q813174)

The authors work on invariants under braid-like isotopy for links. A braid-like isotopy is an isotopy for oriented links which uses only the types of Reidemeister moves which appear in isotopies of braids. They stratify Jones polynomials by configurations of a certain type of circles arising from smoothing of the crossings of an oriented link diagram and define the Khovanov homology corresponding to a simplification of their refined Jones polynomials, obtained by replacing each configuration of circles by a monomial \(x^c\), where \(c\) is the number of the circles in the configuration. For the case of closed braids, their refined Jones polynomials coincide with the refinement given in [\textit{J. Hoste} and \textit{J. Przytycki}, Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 105, 1003--1007 (1989; Zbl 0687.57002)], and the corresponding Khovanov homology coincides with the one constructed in [\textit{M. Asaeda, J. Przytycki} and \textit{A. Sikora}, Algebr. Geom. Topol. 4, 1177--1210 (2004; Zbl 1070.57008)]. For the definitions of Khovanov homology, see [\textit{M. Khovanov}, Duke Math. J. 101, 359--426 (2000; Zbl 0960.57005)] and [\textit{O. Viro}, Fundam. Math. 184, 317--342 (2004; Zbl 1078.57013)].