Kristen Hendricks: Symplectic annular Khovanov homology and knot symmetry

Speaker
Kristen Hendricks, Rutgers University

Abstract
Khovanov homology is a combinatorially-defined invariant which has proved to contain a wealth of geometric information. In 2006 Seidel and Smith introduced a candidate analog of the theory in Lagrangian Floer analog cohomology, which has been shown by Abouzaid and Smith to be isomorphic to the original theory over fields of characteristic zero. The relationship between the theories is still unknown over other fields. In 2010 Seidel and Smith showed there is a spectral sequence relating the symplectic Khovanov homology of a two-periodic knot to the symplectic Khovanov homology of its quotient; in contrast, in 2018 Stoffregen and Zhang used the Khovanov homotopy type to show that there is a spectral sequence from the combinatorial Khovanov homology of a two-periodic knot to the annular Khovanov homology of its quotient. (An alternate proof of this result was subsequently given by Borodzik, Politarczyk, and Silvero.) These results necessarily use coefficients in the field of two elements. This inspired investigations of Mak and Seidel into an annular version of symplectic Khovanov homology, which they defined over characteristic zero. In this talk we introduce a new, conceptually straightforward, formulation of symplectic annular Khovanov homology, defined over any field. Using this theory, we show how to recover the Stoffregen-Zhang spectral sequence on the symplectic side. This is joint work with Cheuk Yu Mak and Sriram Raghunath.