Knots-quivers correspondence

Abstract

We introduce and explore the relation between knot invariants and quiver representation theory, which follows from the identification of quiver quantum mechanics in D-brane systems representing knots. We identify various structural properties of quivers associated to knots, and identify such quivers explicitly in many examples, including some infinite families of knots, all knots up to 6 crossings, and some knots with thick homology. Moreover, based on these properties, we derive previously unknown expressions for colored HOMFLY-PT polynomials and superpolynomials for various knots. For all knots, for which we identify the corresponding quivers, the LMOV conjecture for all symmetric representations (i.e. integrality of relevant BPS numbers) is automatically proved.