Narrow Results

We give presentations of the asymptotic expansions of the Kashaev invariant of hyperbolic knots with seven crossings. As the volume conjecture states, the leading terms of the expansions present the hyperbolic volume and the Chern–Simons invariant of the complements of the knots. As coefficients of the expansions, we obtain a series of new invariants of the knots. This paper is a continuation of the previous papers [T. Ohtsuki, On the asymptotic expansion of the Kashaev invariant of the $5_2$ knot, Quantum Topol.7 (2016) 669–735; T. Ohtsuki and Y. Yokota, On the asymptotic expansion of the Kashaev invariant of the knots with 6 crossings, to appear in Math. Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc.], where the asymptotic expansions of the Kashaev invariant are calculated for hyperbolic knots with five and six crossings. A technical difficulty of this paper is to use 4-variable saddle point method, whose concrete calculations are far more complicated than the previous papers.

Yokota suggested an optimistic limit method of the Kashaev invariants of hyperbolic knots and showed it determines the complex volumes of the knots. His method is very effective and gives almost combinatorial method of calculating the complex volumes. However, to describe the triangulation of the knot complement, he restricted his method to knot diagrams with certain conditions. Although these restrictions are general enough for any hyperbolic knots, we have to select a good diagram of the knot to apply his theory. In this paper, we suggest more combinatorial way to calculate the complex volumes of hyperbolic links using the modified optimistic limit method. This new method works for any link diagrams, and it is more intuitive, easy to handle and has natural geometric meaning.