Heegaard Splittings and Seiberg-Witten monopoles

In this note, we give an exposition of the construction of Seiberg-Witten invariants.

For a rational homology 3-sphere $Y$ with a $\spinc$ structure $\s$, we show that simple algebraic manipulations of our construction of equivariant Seiberg-Witten Floer homology lead to a collection of variants which are topological invariants. We establish exact sequences relating them, we show that they satisfy a duality under orientation reversal, and we explain their relation to ou previous construction of equivariant Seiberg-Witten Floer (co)homologies. We conjecture the...

In this paper, we study the Seiberg-Witten equations on the product R x Y, where Y is a compact 3-manifold with boundary. Following the approach of Salamon and Wehrheim in the instanton case, we impose Lagrangian boundary conditions for the Seiberg- Witten equations. The resulting equations we obtain constitute a nonlinear, nonlocal boundary value problem. We establish regularity, compactness, and Fredholm properties for the Seiberg- Witten equations supplied with Lagrangian ...

Some aspects of the construction of SW Floer homology for manifolds with non-trivial rational homology are analyzed. In particular, the case of manifolds that are obtained as zero-surgery on a knot in a homology sphere, and for torsion spinc structures. We discuss relative invariants in the case of torsion spinc structures.

Knot Floer homology is an invariant for knots discovered by the authors and, independently, Jacob Rasmussen. The discovery of this invariant grew naturally out of studying how a certain three-manifold invariant, Heegaard Floer homology, changes as the three-manifold undergoes Dehn surgery along a knot. Since its original definition, thanks to the contributions of many researchers, knot Floer homology has emerged as a useful tool for studying knots in its own right. We give he...

We reformulate Heegaard Floer homology in terms of holomorphic curves in the cylindrical manifold Sigma x [0,1] x R, where Sigma is the Heegaard surface, instead of Sym^g(Sigma). We then show that the entire invariance proof can be carried out in our setting. In the process, we derive a new formula for the index of the dbar-operator in Heegaard Floer homology, and shorten several proofs. After proving invariance, we show that our construction is equivalent to the original con...

We review the construction of Heegaard Floer homology for closed three-manifolds and also for knots and links in the three-sphere. We also discuss three applications of this invariant to knot theory: studying the Thurston norm of a link complement, the slice genus of a knot, and the unknotting number of a knot. We emphasize the application to the Thurston norm, and illustrate the theory in the case of the Conway link.

We construct equivariant and Bott-type Seiberg-Witten Floer homology and cohomology for 3-manifolds, in particular rational homology spheres, and prove their diffeomorphism invariance. We present several versions of the equivariant theory: the singular version, the de Rham version and the Cartan version, with the first playing the most important role. These versions are shown to be equivalent to each other. A few typos are removed.

We twist the monopole equations of Seiberg and Witten and show how these equations are realized in topological Yang-Mills theory. A Floer derivative and a Morse functional are found and are used to construct a unitary transformation between the usual Floer cohomologies and those of the monopole equations. Furthermore, these equations are seen to reside in the vanishing self-dual curvature condition of an $OSp(1|2)$-bundle. Alternatively, they may be seen arising directly from...

We survey some recent geometric methods for studying Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds