In math.DG/9903083 (henceforth referred to as EA) we defined an integer invariant $h(Y)$ for oriented integral homology 3-spheres $Y$ which only depends on the rational homology cobordism class of $Y$ and is additive under connected sums. In this paper we establish lower bounds for $h(Y)$ when $Y$ is the boundary of a smooth, compact, oriented 4-manifold with $b_2^+=1$. As applications, we give an upper bound for how much $h$ changes under -1 surgery on knots in terms of the slice genus of the knot, and compute $h$ for a family of Brieskorn spheres.
This paper contains, in revised form, most of the material from v1 of EA that was left out in the final version of that paper. In particular, Theorem 1 of the present paper is virtually the same as Theorem 1 of v1 of EA. The proof is also essentially the same, but the exposition has been improved, with more details.
Given a closed, connected, oriented 3-manifold with positive first Betti number, one can define an instanton Floer group as well as a quilted Lagrangian Floer group. The quilted Atiyah-Floer conjecture states that these cohomology groups are isomorphic. We initiate a program for proving this conjecture.
Surgery exact triangles in various 3-manifold Floer homology theories provide an important tool in studying and computing the relevant Floer homology groups. These exact triangles relate the invariants of 3-manifolds, obtained by three different Dehn surgeries on a fixed knot. In this paper, the behavior of $SU(N)$-instanton Floer homology with respect to Dehn surgery is studied. In particular, it is shown that there are surgery exact tetragons and pentagons, respectively, for $SU(3)$- and $SU(4)$-instanton Floer homologies. It is also conjectured that $SU(N)$-instanton Floer homology in gener…
Around 1988, Floer introduced two important theories: instanton Floer homology as invariants of 3-manifolds and Lagrangian Floer homology as invariants of pairs of Lagrangians in symplectic manifolds. Soon after that, Atiyah conjectured that the two theories should be related to each other and Lagrangian Floer homology of certain Lagrangians in the moduli space of flat connections on Riemann surfaces should recover instanton Floer homology. However, the space of flat connections on a Riemann surface is singular and the first step to address this conjecture is to make sense of Lagrangian Floer …
Generalizing our ideas in [arXiv:1006.3313], we explain how topologically-twisted N=2 gauge theory on a four-manifold with boundary, will allow us to furnish purely physical proofs of (i) the Atiyah-Floer conjecture, (ii) Munoz's theorem relating quantum and instanton Floer cohomology, (iii) their monopole counterparts, and (iv) their higher rank generalizations. In the case where the boundary is a Seifert manifold, one can also relate its instanton Floer homology to modules of an affine algebra via a 2d A-model with target the based loop group. As an offshoot, we will be able to demonstrate a…
We show that there is a well-defined cap-product structure on the Fintushel-Stern spectral sequence. Hence we obtain the induced cap-product structure on the ${\BZ}_8$-graded instanton Floer homology. The cap-product structure provides an essentially new property of the instanton Floer homology, from a topological point of view, which multiplies a finite dimensional cohomology class by an infinite dimensional homology class (Floer cycles) to get another infinite dimensional homology class.
This is a mixture of survey article and research anouncement. We discuss Instanton Floer homology for 3 manifolds with boundary. We also discuss a categorification of the Lagrangian Floer theory using the unobstructed immersed Lagrangian correspondence as a morphism in the category of symplectic manifolds. During the year 1998-2012, those problems have been studied emphasising the ideas from analysis such as degeneration and adiabatic limit (Instanton Floer homology) and strip shrinking (Lagrangian correspondence). Recently we found that replacing those analytic approach by a combination of co…
Motivated by the Atiyah-Floer conjecture, we consider $SO(3)$ Santi-self-dual instantons on the product of the real line and a three-manifold with cylindrical end. We prove a Gromov-Uhlenbeck type compactness theorem, namely, any sequence of such instantons with uniform energy bound has a subsequence converging to a type of singular objects which may have both instanton and holomorphic curve components. This result is the first step towards constructing a natural bounding cochain proposed by Fukaya for the $SO(3)$ Atiyah-Floer conjecture.
We refine some classical estimates in Seiberg-Witten theory, and discuss an application to the spectral geometry of three-manifolds. In particular, we show that on a rational homology three-sphere $Y$, for any Riemannian metric the first eigenvalue of the laplacian on coexact one-forms is bounded above explicitly in terms of the Ricci curvature, provided that $Y$ is not an $L$-space (in the sense of Floer homology). The latter is a purely topological condition, and holds in a variety of examples. Performing the analogous refinement in the case of manifolds with $b_1>0$, we obtain a gauge-theor…
Using gauge theory for Spin(7)-manifolds of dimension 8, we develop a procedure, called Spin-rotation, which transforms a (stable) holomorphic structure on a vector bundle over a complex torus of dimension 4 into a new holomorphic structure over a different complex torus. We show non-trivial examples of this procedure by rotating a decomposable Weil abelian variety into a non-decomposable one. As a byproduct, we obtain a Bogomolov type inequality, which gives restrictions for the existence of stable bundles on an abelian variety of dimension 4, and show examples in which this is stronger than …
To an integral homology 3-sphere $Y$, we assign a well-defined $\Z$-graded (monopole) homology $MH_*(Y, I_{\e}(\T; \e_0))$ whose construction in principle follows from the instanton Floer theory with the dependence of the spectral flow $I_{\e}(\T; \e_0)$, where $\T$ is the unique U(1)-reducible monopole of the Seiberg-Witten equation on $Y$ and $\e_0$ is a reference perturbation datum. The definition uses the moduli space of monopoles on $Y \x \R$ introduced by Seiberg-Witten in studying smooth 4-manifolds. We show that the monopole homology $MH_*(Y, I_{\e}(\T; \e_0))$ is invariant among Riema…
In this paper we calculate the Lagrangian Floer homology $HF(L_0, L_1 : {\mathbb Z}_2)$ of a pair of real forms $(L_0,L_1)$ in a monotone Hermitian symmetric space $M$ of compact type in the case where $L_0$ is not necessarily congruent to $L_1$. In particular, we have a generalization of the Arnold-Givental inequality in the case where $M$ is irreducible. As its application, we prove that the totally geodesic Lagrangian sphere in the complex hyperquadric is globally volume minimizing under Hamiltonian deformations.
This is a sequel to the paper [Oh5] (or ArXiv:math.SG/0206092). The main purpose of the paper is to give the proof of an existence theorem, with energy bounds, of certain pseudo-holomorphic sections of the mapping cylinder that is needed for the proof of nondegeneracy of the homological invariant pseudo-norm which the author has constructed on general symplectic manifolds [Oh4,5]. The existence theorem is also the crux of the author's recent proof of an optimal energy-capacity inequality given in [Oh5]. In this paper, we prove a more general existence result than needed in that we study Floer'…
Mutation is an operation on 3-manifolds containing an embedded surface of genus 2. It is defined by cutting along the surface and regluing using the `hyperelliptic' involution, and is known to preserve many 3-manifold invariants. I show that mutation of a homology 3-sphere preserves its (instanton) Floer homology, and that a related operation on 4-manifolds preserves the Donaldson invariants. A companion article (in preparation) will treat invariants based on the Seiberg-Witten equations.
