Related papers: Holomorphic disks and genus bounds

We show that the properties of admitting a co-oriented taut foliation and having a left-orderable fundamental group are equivalent for rational homology $3$-sphere graph manifolds and relate them to the property of not being a…

Given a grid presentation of a knot (or link) K in the three-sphere, we describe a Heegaard diagram for the knot complement in which the Heegaard surface is a torus and all elementary domains are squares. Using this diagram, we obtain a…

We define sutured Heegaard diagrams for null-homologous knots in 3-manifolds. These diagrams are useful for computing the knot Floer homology at the top filtration level. As an application, we give a formula for the knot Floer homology of a…

If a knot $K$ in $S^3$ admits a pair of truly cosmetic surgeries, we show that the surgery slopes are either $\pm 2$ or $\pm 1/q$ for some value of $q$ that is explicitly determined by the knot Floer homology of $K$. Moreover, in the former…

We establish inequalities that constrain the genera of smooth cobordisms between knots in 4-dimensional cobordisms. These "relative adjunction inequalities" improve the adjunction inequalities for closed surfaces which have been…

Given a contact structure on a closed, oriented three-manifold $Y$, we describe an invariant which takes values in the three-manifold's Floer homology $\HFa$. This invariant vanishes for overtwisted contact structures and is non-zero for…

We calculate the Heegaard Floer homologies for three-manifolds obtained by plumbings of spheres specified by certain graphs. Our class of graphs is sufficiently large to describe, for example, all Seifert fibered rational homology spheres.…

The Whitney disks play a central role in defining Heegaard Floer homology of a $3$-dimensional manifold. We use Nielsen theory to a simple criterion to the existence of Whitney disks, connecting two given intersections.

We define several equivariant concordance invariants using knot Floer homology. We show that our invariants provide a lower bound for the equivariant slice genus and use this to give a family of strongly invertible slice knots whose…

This paper establishes a new technique that enables us to access some fundamental structural properties of instanton Floer homology. As an application, we establish, for the first time, a relation between the instanton Floer homology of a…

Turaev defined a function on the first homology of a rational homology 3-sphere $Y$ as the minimal rational Seifert genus of all knots in this homology class. Ni and the first author discovered a lower bound of this function using the…

In the present work we generalize the construction of monopole Floer homology due to Kronheimer and Mrowka to the case of a gradient flow with Morse-Bott singularities. Focusing then on the special case of a three-manifold equipped with a…

We show that all versions of Heegaard Floer homology, link Floer homology, and sutured Floer homology are natural. That is, they assign concrete groups to each based 3-manifold, based link, and balanced sutured manifold, respectively.…

Given a self-diffeomorphism h of a closed, orientable surface S and an embedding f of S into a three-manifold M, we construct a mutant manifold N by cutting M along f(S) and regluing by h. We will consider whether there are any gluings such…

Every element in the first cohomology group of a 3--manifold is dual to embedded surfaces. The Thurston norm measures the minimal `complexity' of such surfaces. For instance the Thurston norm of a knot complement determines the genus of the…

We show that if a positive integral surgery on a knot K inside a homology sphere X with Seifert genus g(K) results in an induced knot K_n in X_n(K)=Y which has simple Floer homology, we should have n>=2g(K). Moreover, if X is the standard…

Heegaard Floer theory is a kind of topological quantum field theory, assigning graded groups to closed, connected, oriented 3-manifolds and group homomorphisms to smooth, oriented 4-dimensional cobordisms. Bordered Heegaard Floer homology…

In an earlier paper (math.SG/0101206), we introduced Floer homology theories associated to closed, oriented three-manifolds Y and SpinC structures. In the present paper, we give calculations and study the properties of these invariants. The…

We define a torsion invariant T for every balanced sutured manifold (M,g), and show that it agrees with the Euler characteristic of sutured Floer homology SFH. The invariant T is easily computed using Fox calculus. With the help of T, we…

In this thesis, we prove several results concerning field-theoretic invariants of knots and 3-manifolds. In Chapter 2, for any knot $K$ in a closed, oriented 3-manifold $M$, we use $SU(2)$ representation spaces and the Lagrangian field…