Steinberg skein identities at roots of unity

Abstract

We obtain a family of skein identities in the Kauffman bracket skein module which relate Frobenius elements to Jones-Wenzl projectors at roots of unity. We view these skein identities as certain incarnations of Steinberg tensor product formulae from the theory of tilting modules of the quantum group $U_q(sl_2)$. We show that the simplest skein identities yield a short new proof of the existence of the Chebyshev-Frobenius homomorphism of Bonahon-Wong.