Khovanov homology, Lee homology and a Rasmussen invariant for virtual knots

Abstract

The paper contains an essentially self-contained treatment of Khovanov homology, Khovanov–Lee homology as well as the Rasmussen invariant for virtual knots and virtual knot cobordisms which directly applies as well to classical knots and classical knot cobordisms. We give an alternate formulation for the Manturov definition [34] of Khovanov homology [25], [26] for virtual knots and links with arbitrary coefficients. This approach uses cut loci on the knot diagram to induce a conjugation operator in the Frobenius algebra. We use this to show that a large class of virtual knots with unit Jones polynomial is non-classical, proving a conjecture in [20] and [10]. We then discuss the implications of the maps induced in the aforementioned theory to the universal Frobenius algebra [27] for virtual knots. Next we show how one can apply the Karoubi envelope approach of Bar-Natan and Morrison [3] on abstract link diagrams [17] with cross cuts to construct the canonical generators of the Khovanov–Lee homology [30]. Using these canonical generators we derive a generalization of the Rasmussen invariant [39] for virtual knot cobordisms and generalize Rasmussen’s result on the slice genus for positive knots to the case of positive virtual knots. It should also be noted that this generalization of the Rasmussen invariant provides an easy to compute obstruction to knot cobordisms in [Formula: see text] in the sense of Turaev [42].