Proof. We have already explained the two isomorphisms. We now need to understand the essential image of under the full embedding into . We claim that the invariant of any -tangle decomposes into (shifts of) the indecomposable summands and , but never for . Provided this claim holds, we can compute as the Hochschild homology of the full additive subcategory of generated by and , and this again is isomorphic to the Hochschild homology of the full subcategory on the two objects and . Here we use that the zeroth Hochschild homology is preserved under proceeding to the additive and idempotent completion; see FactΒ 4.12. Following the same arguments as in PropositionΒ 4.14, we see that it is -dimensional, spanned by and for
The key idea to prove the claim is that all complexes appearing in Khovanov homology come from complexes over by setting (though certainly not all complexes over have this property). Indeed, one can use equivariant Khovanov homology, defined over the ring to simplify the complex of a -tangle into a complex of graded free -modules. These decompose, up to homotopy equivalence and shift, into chain complexes of the form
Upon reducing to the ordinary Khovanov theory by tensoring with over , these complexes decompose into (shifts of) copies of and . β