2017 Theses Doctoral

Unoriented skein relations for grid homology and tangle Floer homology

Wong, C.-M. Michael

Grid homology is a combinatorial version of knot Floer homology. In a previous thesis, the author established an unoriented skein exact triangle for grid homology, giving a combinatorial proof of Manolescu’s unoriented skein exact triangle for knot Floer homology, and extending Manolescu’s result from Z/2Z coefficients to coefficients in any commutative ring.
In Part II of this dissertation, after recalling the combinatorial proof mentioned above, we track the delta-gradings of the maps involved in the skein exact triangle, and use them to establish the Floer-homological sigma-thinness of quasi-alternating links over any commutative ring.
Tangle Floer homology is a combinatorial extension of knot Floer homology to tangles, introduced by Petkova–Vertesi; it assigns an A-infinity-(bi)module to each tangle, so that the knot Floer homology of a link L obtained by gluing together tangles T_1, ..., T_n can be recovered from a tensor product of the A-infinity-(bi)modules assigned to the tangles T_i. Currently, tangle Floer homology has only been defined over Z/2Z. Part III of this dissertation presents a joint result with Ina Petkova, establishing an analogous unoriented skein relation for tangle Floer homology over Z/2Z, and tracking the delta-gradings involved.