A volume-ish theorem for the Jones polynomial of alternating knots

The Volume conjecture claims that the hyperbolic Volume of a knot is determined by the colored Jones polynomial. The purpose of this article is to show a Volume-ish theorem for alternating knots in terms of the Jones polynomial, rather than the colored Jones polynomial: The ratio of the Volume and certain sums of coefficients of the Jones polynomial is bounded from above and from below by constants. Furthermore, we give experimental data on the relation of the growths of the hyperbolic volume and the coefficients of the Jones polynomial, both for alternating and non-alternating knots.Comment: 14 page

On the Combinatorial Structure of Primitive Vassiliev Invariants, III - A Lower Bound

We prove that the dimension of the space of primitive Vassiliev invariants of degree n grows - as n tends to infinity - faster than Exp(c Sqrt(n)) for any c < Pi Sqrt (2/3). The proof relies on the use of the weight systems coming from the Lie algebra gl(N). In fact, we show that our bound is - up to multiplication with a rational function in n - the best possible that one can get with gl(N)-weight systems.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figure

Extremal Khovanov homology of Turaev genus one links

The Turaev genus of a link can be thought of as a way of measuring how non-alternating a link is. A link is Turaev genus zero if and only if it is alternating, and in this viewpoint, links with large Turaev genus are very non-alternating. In this paper, we study Turaev genus one links, a class of links which includes almost alternating links. We prove that the Khovanov homology of a Turaev genus one link is isomorphic to $\mathbb{Z}$ in at least one of its extremal quantum gradings. As an application, we compute or nearly compute the maximal Thurston Bennequin number of a Turaev genus one link.Comment: 30 pages, 18 figure