Filtrations on the knot contact homology of transverse knots

Abstract: We construct a new invariant of transverse links in the standard contact structure on R^3. This invariant is a doubly filtered version of the knot contact homology differential graded algebra (DGA) of the link. Here the knot contact homology of a link in R^3 is the Legendrian contact homology DGA of its conormal lift into the unit cotangent bundle S^*R^3 of R^3, and the filtrations are constructed by counting intersections of the holomorphic disks of the DGA differential with two conormal lifts of the contact structure. We also present a combinatorial formula for the filtered DGA in terms of braid representatives of transverse links and apply it to show that the new invariant is independent of previously known invariants of transverse links.

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The following is an excerpt from the authors' abstract and introduction: The authors construct a new invariant of transverse links in the standard contact structure on \(\mathbb{R}^3\). This invariant is a doubly filtered version of the knot contact homology differential graded algebra (DGA) of the link. In [Duke Math. J. 141, No. 2, 365--406 (2008; Zbl 1145.57010)] the third author constructed a combinatorial DGA associated to a framed knot \(K\subset \mathbb{R}^3\) and showed that its combinatorial knot contact homology is an invariant of framed knots. This invariant detects the unknot and encodes the Alexander polynomial, among other things. The current authors proved in [``Knot contact homology (2012), \url{arxiv:1109.1542}] that the combinatorial DGA is (stable tame) isomorphic to the Legendrian contact homology DGA of the conformal lift of a knot \(K\) and also generalized the combinatorial description of knot contact homology to many-component links. Here, the conormal lift of a link \(K\) is a union \(\Lambda_K\) of Legendrian tori in the unit cotangent bundle \(S^*\mathbb{R}^3\) of \(\mathbb{R}^3\) with the contact structure given as the kernel of the canonical 1-form. The Legendrian contact homology DGA of \(\Lambda _K\) is an algebra generated by its Reeb chords with differential defined by a count of holomorphic disks in \(S^*\mathbb{R}^3\times \mathbb{R}\) in the spirit of symplectic field theory (see [\textit{Y. Eliasberg} et al., in: Proceedings of a meeting, Tel Aviv, Israel, 1999. Part II. Basel: Birkhäuser, 560--673 (2000; Zbl 0989.81114)]). Its calculation in [the authors, loc. cit.] uses the contactomorphism \(S^*\mathbb{R}^3\approx T^*S^2\times \mathbb{R}\) to transfer the holomorphic disk count in \(S^*\mathbb{R}^3\times \mathbb{R}\) to \(T^*S^2\). The disk count is then carried out using the relation between holomorphic disks and Morse flow trees (see [\textit{T. Ekholm}, Geom. Topol. 11, 1083--1224 (2007; Zbl 1162.53064)]). The authors of the present paper call the Legendrian invariant of \(\Lambda_K\) defined by using holomorphic disks the knot contact homology of \(K\). They denote the underling DGA by \((KC\mathcal{A}(K),\partial)\) and its homology by \(KCH(K)\). The algebra \(KC\mathcal{A}(K)\) is a free graded tensor algebra over the coefficient ring \(R=\mathbb{Z}[H_1(\Lambda_K)]=\mathbb{Z}[\lambda_1^{\pm 1},\mu_1^{\pm 1},\dots, \lambda_r^{\pm 1},\mu_r^{\pm 1}]\), where \(r\) is the number of components of \(K\); the differential \(\partial\) depends on \(K\) as well, but the authors suppress this dependence to simplify notation. Let \((x_1,x_2,x_3)\) be coordinates on \(\mathbb{R}^3\) and let \(\xi_0=\mathrm{ker}(dx_3-x_1dx_2+x_2dx_1)\) denote the standard tight, rotationally symmetric contact structure on \(\mathbb{R}^3\). For links \(K\) transverse to \(\xi_0\), the authors extend the coefficient ring of the knot contact homology DGA to \(R[U,V]\), where \(U\) and \(V\) are two formal variables which encode intersections of holomorphic disks with the natural lifts of \(\xi_0\) that correspond to its two coorientations. The resulting DGA is denoted by \((KC\mathcal{A}^{-}(K),\partial^{-})\) and has a double filtration: By positivity of intersections, the differential \(\partial^{-}\) does not decrease the exponents of \(U\) or \(V\). The main result of the paper is the following theorem. Theorem 1.1. The filtered stable tame isomorphism type of \((KC\mathcal{A}^{-}(K),\partial^{-})\), and hence its homology, is an invariant of the transverse knot or link \(K\) in \((\mathbb{R}^3,\xi_0)\). The authors also present a combinatorial formula for the filtered DGA in terms of braid representatives of transverse links and apply it to show that the new invariant is independent of previously known invariants of transverse links.

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