Deformations of colored sl(N) link homologies via foams

Abstract

We generalize results of Lee, Gornik and Wu on the structure of deformed colored sl(N) link homologies to the case of non-generic deformations. To this end, we use foam technology to give a completely combinatorial construction of Wu's deformed colored sl(N) link homologies. By studying the underlying deformed higher representation theoretic structures and generalizing the Karoubi envelope approach of Bar-Natan and Morrison we explicitly compute the deformed invariants in terms of undeformed type A link homologies of lower rank and color.