Torus knots, the A-polynomial, and SL(2,C)

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Baldwin, John A., Sivek, Steven
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866908830351228928
author Baldwin, John A.
Sivek, Steven
author_facet Baldwin, John A.
Sivek, Steven
contents The A-polynomial of a knot is defined in terms of SL(2,C) representations of the knot group, and encodes information about essential surfaces in the knot complement. In 2005, Dunfield-Garoufalidis and Boyer-Zhang proved that it detects the unknot using Kronheimer-Mrowka's work on the Property P conjecture. Here we use more recent results from instanton Floer homology to prove that a version of the A-polynomial detects whether a knot is a torus knot. We moreover completely determine which individual torus knots are detected by this A-polynomial. These results enable progress towards a folklore conjecture about boundary slopes of non-torus knots. Finally, we use similar ideas to prove that a knot in the 3-sphere admits infinitely many SL(2,C)-abelian Dehn surgeries if and only if it is a torus knot, affirming a variant of a conjecture due to Sivek-Zentner.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_19197
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Torus knots, the A-polynomial, and SL(2,C)
Baldwin, John A.
Sivek, Steven
Geometric Topology
The A-polynomial of a knot is defined in terms of SL(2,C) representations of the knot group, and encodes information about essential surfaces in the knot complement. In 2005, Dunfield-Garoufalidis and Boyer-Zhang proved that it detects the unknot using Kronheimer-Mrowka's work on the Property P conjecture. Here we use more recent results from instanton Floer homology to prove that a version of the A-polynomial detects whether a knot is a torus knot. We moreover completely determine which individual torus knots are detected by this A-polynomial. These results enable progress towards a folklore conjecture about boundary slopes of non-torus knots. Finally, we use similar ideas to prove that a knot in the 3-sphere admits infinitely many SL(2,C)-abelian Dehn surgeries if and only if it is a torus knot, affirming a variant of a conjecture due to Sivek-Zentner.
title Torus knots, the A-polynomial, and SL(2,C)
topic Geometric Topology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.19197