Homological Knot Invariants from Mirror Symmetry

Abstract

In 1999, Khovanov showed that a link invariant known as the Jones polynomial is the Euler characteristic of a homology theory. The knot categorification problem is to find a general construction of knot homology groups, and to explain their meaning -- what are they homologies of? Homological mirror symmetry, formulated by Kontsevich in 1994, naturally produces hosts of homological invariants. Typically though, it leads to invariants which have no particular interest outside of the problem at hand. I showed recently that there is a new family of mirror pairs of manifolds, for which homological mirror symmetry does lead to interesting invariants and solves the knot categorification problem. The resulting invariants are computable explicitly for any simple Lie algebra, and certain Lie superalgebras.