The purpose of this survey is to explain an approach to the Atiyah-Floer conjecture via a new instanton Floer homology with Lagrangian boundary conditions. This is a joint project with Dietmar Salamon. This paper also provides a rough guide to the analysis of anti-self-dual instantons with Lagrangian boundary conditions (in earlier papers), which is the crucial ingredient of our approach.
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.
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 …
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. Each of these is equipped with a chain level grading. We show that the gradings agree.
In this paper we define instanton Floer homology groups for a pair consisting of a compact oriented 3-manifold with boundary and a Lagrangian submanifold of the moduli space of flat SU(2)-connections over the boundary. We carry out the construction for a general class of irreducible, monotone boundary conditions. The main examples of such Lagrangian submanifolds are induced from a disjoint union of handle bodies such that the union of the 3-manifold and the handle bodies is an integral homology 3-sphere. The motivation for introducing these invariants arises from our program for a proof of the…
We define an invariant of contact 3-manifolds with convex boundary using Kronheimer and Mrowka's sutured instanton Floer homology theory. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first invariant of contact manifolds -- with or without boundary -- defined in the instanton Floer setting. We prove that our invariant vanishes for overtwisted contact structures and is nonzero for contact manifolds with boundary which embed into Stein fillable contact manifolds. Moreover, we propose a strategy by which our contact invariant might be used to relate the fundamental group of a closed contact 3-manifol…
Since its inception, Floer homology has been an important tool in low-dimensional topology. Floer theoretic invariants of $3$-manifolds tend to be either gauge theoretic or symplecto-geometric in nature, and there is a general philosophy that each gauge theoretic Floer homology should have a corresponding symplectic Floer homology and vice-versa. In this article, we construct a Lagrangian Floer invariant for any closed, oriented $3$-manifold $Y$ (called the symplectic instanton homology of $Y$ and denoted $\mathrm{SI}(Y)$) which is conjecturally equivalent to a Floer homology defined using a c…
There have been a number of constructions of Lagrangian Floer homology invariants for $3$-manifolds defined in terms of symplectic character varieties arising from Heegaard splittings. With the aim of establishing an Atiyah-Floer counterpart of Kronheimer and Mrowka's singular instanton homology, we generalize one of these, due to H. Horton, to produce a Lagrangian Floer invariant of a knot or link $K \subset Y$ in a closed, oriented $3$-manifold, which we call symplectic instanton knot homology ($\mathrm{SIK}$). We use a multi-pointed Heegaard diagram to parametrize the gluing together of a p…
In this paper, we first provide an explicit description of {\it all} holomorphic discs (``disc instantons'') attached to Lagrangian torus fibers of arbitrary compact toric manifolds, and prove their Fredholm regularity. Using this, we compute Fukaya-Oh-Ohta-Ono's (FOOO's) obstruction (co)chains and the Floer cohomology of Lagrangian torus fibers of Fano toric manifolds. In particular specializing to the formal parameter $T^{2π} = e^{-1}$, our computation verifies the folklore that FOOO's obstruction (co)chains correspond to the Landau-Ginzburg superpotentials under the mirror symmetry correspo…
In this paper the author discuss the relation between Lagrangian Floer homology and Gauge-theory (Donaldson theory) Floer homology. It can be regarded as a version of Atiyah-Floer type conjecture in the case of $SO(3)$-bundle with non-trivial second Stiefel-Whitney class. This is a first of a series of papers, where we describe the main results and geometric and algebraic parts of the proof. The half of analytic detail was in [Fu5] which was published in 1998. The other half will appear in subsequent papers.
We study a nonlocal boundary value problem for anti-self-dual instantons on 4-manifolds with a space-time splitting of the boundary. The model case is $\R \times Y$, where $Y$ is a compact oriented 3-manifold with boundary $Σ$. The restriction of the instanton to each time slice ${t}\timesΣ$ is required to lie in a fixed (singular) Lagrangian submanifold of the moduli space of flat connections over $Σ$. We establish the basic regularity and compactness properties (assuming $L^p$-bounds on the curvature) as well as the Fredholm theory in a compact model case. The motivation for studying this bo…
We study bubbling phenomena of anti-self-dual instantons on $\H^2\times§$, where $§$ is a closed Riemann surface. The restriction of the instanton to each boundary slice $\{z\}\times§$, $z\in\pd\H^2$ is required to lie in a Lagrangian submanifold of the moduli space of flat connections over $§$ that arises from the restrictions to the boundary of flat connections on a handle body. We establish an energy quantization result for sequences of instantons with bounded energy near $\{0\}\times§$: Either their curvature is in fact uniformly bounded in a neighbourhood of that slice (leading to a compa…
Starting from a Heegaard splitting of a three-manifold, we use Lagrangian Floer homology to construct a three-manifold invariant, in the form of a relatively Z/8-graded abelian group. Our motivation is to have a well-defined symplectic side of the Atiyah-Floer Conjecture, for arbitrary three-manifolds. The symplectic manifold used in the construction is the extended moduli space of flat SU(2)-connections on the Heegaard surface. An open subset of this moduli space carries a symplectic form, and each of the two handlebodies in the decomposition gives rise to a Lagrangian inside the open set. In…
We prove that Khovanov homology detects the trefoils. Our proof incorporates an array of ideas in Floer homology and contact geometry. It uses open books; the contact invariants we defined in the instanton Floer setting; a bypass exact triangle in sutured instanton homology, proven here; and Kronheimer and Mrowka's spectral sequence relating Khovanov homology with singular instanton knot homology. As a byproduct, we also strengthen a result of Kronheimer and Mrowka on $SU(2)$ representations of the knot group.
Kronheimer and Mrowka defined invariants of balanced sutured manifolds using monopole and instanton Floer homology. Their invariants assign isomorphism classes of modules to balanced sutured manifolds. In this paper, we introduce refinements of these invariants which assign much richer algebraic objects called projectively transitive systems of modules to balanced sutured manifolds and isomorphisms of such systems to diffeomorphisms of balanced sutured manifolds. Our work provides the foundation for extending these sutured Floer theories to other interesting functorial frameworks as well, and …
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…
In arXiv:1611.09927, we constructed a well-defined Lagrangian Floer invariant for any closed, oriented $3$-manifold $Y$ via the symplectic geometry of so-called traceless $\mathrm{SU}(2)$-character varieties. This invariant, $\mathrm{SI}(Y)$, which we refer to as the symplectic instanton homology of $Y$, was also shown to satisfy an exact triangle for Dehn surgeries on knots which is typical of Floer-theoretic invariants of $3$-manifolds. In this article, we demonstrate further structural properties of this symplectic instanton homology. For example, Floer theories are expected to roughly sati…
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.
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…
The mixed equation, defined as a combination of the anti-self-duality equation in gauge theory and Cauchy-Riemann equation in symplectic geometry, is studied. In particular, regularity and Fredholm properties are established for the solutions of this equation, and it is shown that the moduli spaces of solutions to the mixed equation satisfy a compactness property which combines Uhlenbeck and Gormov compactness theorems. The results of this paper are used in a sequel to study the Atiyah-Floer conjecture.
Given a Heegaard splitting of a three-manifold Y, we consider the SL(2,C) character variety of the Heegaard surface, and two complex Lagrangians associated to the handlebodies. We focus on the smooth open subset corresponding to irreducible representations. On that subset, the intersection of the Lagrangians is an oriented d-critical locus in the sense of Joyce. Bussi associates to such an intersection a perverse sheaf of vanishing cycles. We prove that in our setting, the perverse sheaf is an invariant of Y, i.e., it is independent of the Heegaard splitting. The hypercohomology of this sheaf …
We examine the $L^2$-topology of the gauge orbits over a closed Riemann surface. We prove a subtle local slice theorem based on the div-curl Lemma of harmonic analysis, and deduce local pathwise connectedness and local uniform quasiconvexity of the gauge orbits. Using these, we generalize compactness results for anti-self-dual instantons with Lagrangian boundary counditions to general gauge invariant Lagrangian submanifolds. This provides the foundation for the construction of instanton Floer homology for pairs of a $3$-manifold with boundary and a Lagrangian in the configuration space over th…
The main purpose of this paper is to give a general regularity result for Cauchy-Riemann equations in complex Banach spaces with totally real boundary conditions. The usual elliptic $L^p$-regularity results hold true under one crucial assumption: The totally real submanifold has to be modelled on an $L^p$-space or a closed subspace thereof. Secondly, we describe a class of examples of such totally real submanifolds, namely gauge invariant Lagrangian submanifolds in the space of connections over a Riemann surface. These pose natural boundary conditions for the anti-self-duality equation on 4-ma…
