Categorified skew Howe duality and comparison of knot homologies
Abstract
In this paper, we show an isomorphism of homological knot invariants categorifying the Reshetikhin-Turaev invariants for
sl
n
. Over the past decade, such invariants have been constructed in a variety of different ways, using matrix factorizations, category
O
, affine Grassmannians, and diagrammatic categorifications of tensor products.
While the definitions of these theories are quite different, there is a key commonality between them which makes it possible to prove that they are all isomorphic: they arise from a skew Howe dual action of
gl
ℓ
for some
ℓ
. In this paper, we show that the construction of knot homology based on categorifying tensor products (from earlier work of the second author) fits into this framework, and thus agrees with other such homologies, such as Khovanov-Rozansky homology. We accomplish this by categorifying the action of
gl
ℓ
×
gl
n
on
⋀
p
(
C
ℓ
⊗
C
n
)
using diagrammatic bimodules. In this action, the functors corresponding to
gl
ℓ
and
gl
n
are quite different in nature, but they will switch roles under Koszul duality.