Positivity and log concavity of the Links--Gould polynomial of knots

Abstract

Motivated by the recent work of Harper--Kohli--Song--Tahar, we formulate a positivity, hole-free, and log-concavity conjecture for the Links--Gould polynomial of alternating links and verify it for all 51.3 million alternating knots with at most 19 crossings. All but 544 of those knots satisfy a stronger type-B log-concavity condition characterized by the slopes of edges in the subdivision of the monomial support induced by the log coefficients.