Regular Legendrian knots and the HOMFLY polynomial of immersed plane curves

Abstract.

We show that every unframed knot type in $ST^*{\bf \mathrm{R}}^2$ has a representative obtained by the Legendrian lifting of an immersed plane curve. This gives a positive answer to the question asked by V.I.Arnold in [3]. The Legendrian lifting lowers the framed version of the HOMFLY polynomial [20] to generic plane curves. We prove that the induced polynomial invariant can be completely defined in terms of plane curves only. Moreover it is a genuine, not Laurent, polynomial in the framing variable. This provides an estimate on the Bennequin-Tabachnikov number of a Legendrian knot.