Involutive Khovanov homology and equivariant knots II

Abstract

In the spirit of Bar-Natan's formulation of Khovanov homology for tangles, we extend the framework of involutive Khovanov homology to involutive tangles. This enables a divide-and-conquer computation of involutive Khovanov homology and the equivariant Rasmussen invariant, which results in a significant speedup for the algorithmic computation. With this, we obtain new examples of strongly invertible knots for which no slice disk is smoothly isotopic rel boundary to its symmetric counterpart. In particular, we show that the Whitehead doubles of the pretzel knots $P(-3,3,-3)$ and $P(-5,5,-5)$ admit exotic pairs of slice disks.

49 pages. Comments are welcome!