Bing doubling and the colored Jones polynomial

Abstract

Bing doubling is a satellite operation on links which replaces a knot component with a 2-component link in a certain way. In this paper we give a formula for the reduced colored Jones polynomial of a Bing double in terms of that of the companion. Using this formula we derive a divisibility property of the unified Witten–Reshetikhin–Turaev invariant of integral homology spheres obtained by ±1-surgery along Bing doubles of knots. This result is applied to the Witten–Reshetikhin–Turaev invariant and the Ohtsuki series of these integral homology spheres.