Categorified skew Howe duality and comparison of knot homologies

Abstract: In this paper, we show an isomorphism of homological knot invariants categorifying the Reshetikhin-Turaev invariants for $\mathfrak{sl}n$. Over the past decade, such invariants have been constructed in a variety of different ways, using matrix factorizations, category $\mathcal{O}$, affine Grassmannians, and diagrammatic categorifications of tensor products. While the definitions of these theories are quite different, there is a key commonality between them which makes it possible to prove that they are all isomorphic: they arise from a skew Howe dual action of $\mathfrak{gl}\ell$ for some $\ell$. In this paper, we show that the construction of knot homology based on categorifying tensor products (from earlier work of the second author) fits into this framework, and thus agrees with other such homologies, such as Khovanov-Rozansky homology. We accomplish this by categorifying the action of $\mathfrak{gl}\ell\times \mathfrak{gl}_n$ on $\bigwedge\nolimits^{!p}(\mathbb{C}^\ell\otimes \mathbb{C}^n)$ using diagrammatic bimodules. In this action, the functors corresponding to $\mathfrak{gl}\ell$ and $\mathfrak{gl}_n$ are quite different in nature, but they will switch roles under Koszul duality.