We prove a conjecture of Lê and Sikora by providing a comparison between various existing $SL_n$ skein theories. While doing so, we show that the full subcategory of the spider category, $\mathcal {S}p(SL_n)$, defined by Cautis–Kamnitzer–Morrison, whose objects are monoidally generated by the standard representation and its dual, is equivalent as a spherical braided category to Sikora’s quotient category. This also answers a question from Morrison’s Ph.D. thesis. Finally, we show that the skein modules associated with the CKM and Sikora’s webs are isomorphic.

We show that the only way of changing the framing of a link by ambient isotopy in an oriented $3$-manifold is when the manifold has a properly embedded non-separating $S^{2}$. This change of framing is given by the Dirac trick, also known as the light bulb trick. The main tool we use is based on McCullough’s work on the mapping class groups of $3$-manifolds. We also relate our results to the theory of skein modules.

In this paper we propose and discuss implications of a general conjecture that there is a natural action of a rank 1 double affine Hecke algebra on the Kauffman bracket skein module of the complement of a knot $K\subset S^{3}$ . We prove this in a number of nontrivial cases, including all $(2,2p+1)$ torus knots, the figure eight knot, and all 2-bridge knots (when $q=\pm 1$ ). As the main application of the conjecture, we construct three-variable polynomial knot invariants that specialize to the classical colored Jones polynomials introduced by Reshetikhin and Turaev. We also deduce some new properties of the classical Jones polynomials and prove that these hold for all knots (independently of the conjecture). We furthermore conjecture that the skein module of the unknot is a submodule of the skein module of an arbitrary knot. We confirm this for the same example knots, and we show that this implies that the colored Jones polynomials of $K$ satisfy an inhomogeneous recursion relation.