A tour of bordered Floer theory

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 is an extension of Heegaard Floer homology to 3-manifolds with boundary, with extended-TQFT-type gluing properties. In this survey, we explain the formal structure and construction of bordered Floer homology and sketch how it can be used to compute some aspects of Heegaard Floer theory.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

An overview of knot Floer homology

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 here a few selected highlights of this theory, and then move on to some new algebraic developments in the computation of knot Floer homology

Notes on bordered Floer homology

This is a survey of bordered Heegaard Floer homology, an extension of the Heegaard Floer invariant HF-hat to 3-manifolds with boundary. Emphasis is placed on how bordered Heegaard Floer homology can be used for computations.Comment: 73 pages, 29 figures. Based on lectures at the Contact and Symplectic Topology Summer School in Budapest, July 2012. v2: Fixed many small typo

A survey of Heegaard Floer homology

This work has two goals. The first is to provide a conceptual introduction to Heegaard Floer homology, the second is to survey the current state of the field, without aiming for completeness. After reviewing the structure of Heegaard Floer homology, we list some of its most important applications. Many of these are purely topological results, not referring to Heegaard Floer homology itself. Then, we briefly outline the construction of Lagrangian intersection Floer homology. We construct the Heegaard Floer chain complex as a special case of the above, and try to motivate the role of the various seemingly ad hoc features such as admissibility, the choice of basepoint, and Spin^c-structures. We also discuss the proof of invariance of the homology up to isomorphism under all the choices made, and how to define Heegaard Floer homology using this in a functorial way (naturality). Next, we explain why Heegaard Floer homology is computable, and how it lends itself to the various combinatorial descriptions. The last chapter gives an overview of the definition and applications of sutured Floer homology, which includes sketches of some of the key proofs. Throughout, we have tried to collect some of the important open conjectures in the area. For example, a positive answer to two of these would give a new proof of the Poincar\'e conjecture.Comment: 38 pages, 1 figure, a few minor correction

Concordance homomorphisms from knot Floer homology

We modify the construction of knot Floer homology to produce a one-parameter family of homologies for knots in the three-sphere. These invariants can be used to give homomorphisms from the smooth concordance group to the integers, giving bounds on the four-ball genus and the concordance genus of knots. We give some applications of these homomorphisms.Comment: Minor revision, corrected typos and added explanation to Chapter