Framed graphs and the non-local ideal in the knot Floer cube of resolutions

Abstract: This article addresses the two significant aspects of Ozsv\'ath and Szab\'o's knot Floer cube of resolutions that differentiate it from Khovanov and Rozansky's HOMFLY-PT chain complex: (1) the use of twisted coefficients and (2) the appearance of a mysterious non-local ideal. Our goal is to facilitate progress on Rasmussen's conjecture that a spectral sequence relates the two knot homologies. We replace the language of twisted coefficients with the more quantum topological language of framings on trivalent graphs. We define a homology theory for framed trivalent graphs with boundary that -- for a particular non-blackboard framing -- specializes to the homology of singular knots underlying the knot Floer cube of resolutions. For blackboard framed graphs, our theory conjecturally recovers the graph homology underlying the HOMFLY-PT chain complex. We explain the appearance of the non-local ideal by expressing it as an ideal quotient of an ideal that appears in both the HOMFLY-PT and knot Floer cubes of resolutions. This result is a corollary of our main theorem, which is that closing a strand in a braid graph corresponds to taking an ideal quotient of its non-local ideal. The proof is a Gr\"obner basis argument that connects the combinatorics of the non-local ideal to those of Buchberger's Algorithm.