On Jaeger's HOMFLY-PT expansions, branching rules and link homology: a progress report

This note is a write-up of a talk given by the author at the Meeting of the Sociedade Portuguesa de Matematica in July 2012. We describe Jaeger's HOMFLY-PT expansion of the Kauffman polynomial and how to generalize it to other quantum invariants using the so-called "branching rules" for Lie algebra representations. We present a program which aims to construct Jaeger expansions for link homology theories.