Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

2-21-2017

Publication Title

Proceedings of the 2014 Maui and 2015 Qinhuangdao Conferences in Honour of Vaughan F.R. Jones’ 60th Birthday.

Volume

46

Pages

415-427

Publisher Name

The Australian National University

Abstract

We consider two well known constructions of link invariants. One uses skein theory: you resolve each crossing of the link as a linear combination of things that don’t cross, until you eventually get a linear combination of links with no crossings, which you turn into a polynomial. The other uses quantum groups: you construct a functor from a topological category to some category of representations in such a way that (directed framed) links get sent to endomorphisms of the trivial representation, which are just rational functions. Certain instances of these two constructions give rise to essentially the same invariants, but when one carefully matches them there is a minus sign that seems out of place. We discuss exactly how the constructions match up in the case of the Jones polynomial, and where the minus sign comes from. On the quantum group side, one is led to use a non-standard ribbon element, which then allows one to consider a larger topological category.

Comments

Author Posting. © Centre for Mathematics and its Applications, Mathematical Sciences Institute, The Australian National University 2017. This article is posted here by permission of The Australian National University for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in the Proceedings of the 2014 Maui and 2015 Qinhuangdao Conferences in Honour of Vaughan F.R. Jones’ 60th Birthday, 2017, pp. 415-427, https://projecteuclid.org/ euclid.pcma/1487646036

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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