The KNTZ trick from arborescent calculus and the structure of the differential expansion

Abstract

The recently suggested KNTZ trick completed the lasting search for exclusive Racah matrices $\bar S$ and $S$ for all rectangular representations and has a potential to help in the non-rectangular case as well. This was the last lacking insight about the structure of differential expansion of (rectangularly-)colored knot polynomials for twist knots -- and the resulting success is a spectacular achievement of modern knot theory in a classical field of representation theory, which was originally thought to be a tool for knot calculus but instead appeared to be its direct beneficiary. In this paper we explain that the KNTZ ansatz is actually a suggestion to convert the arborescent evolution matrix $\bar S\bar T^2\bar S$ into triangular form ${\cal B}$ and demonstrate how this works and what is the form of the old puzzles and miracles of the differential expansions from this perspective. The main new fully result is the conjecture for the triangular matrix ${\cal B}$ in the case of non-rectangular representation $[3,1]$. This paper does not simplify any calculations, but highlights the remaining problems, which one needs to overcome in order to {\it prove} that things really work. We believe that this discussion is also useful for further steps towards non-rectangular case and the related search of the gauge-invariant arborescent vertices. As an example we formulate a puzzling, still experimentally supported conjecture, that the study of twist knots only is sufficient to describe the shape of the differential expansion for all knots.