On Habiro's cyclotomic expansions of the Ohtsuki invariant

Abstract

We give a self-contained treatment of Le and Habiro's approach to the Jones function of a knot and Habiro's cyclotomic form of the Ohtsuki invariant for manifolds obtained by surgery around a knot. On the way we reproduce a state sum formula of Garoufalidis and Le for the colored Jones function of a knot. As a corollary, we obtain bounds on the growth of coefficients in the Ohtsuki series for manifolds obtained by surgery around a knot, which support the slope conjecture of Jacoby and the first author.