The reduced knot Floer complex (Q500931)

Knot Floer homology is an invariant of knots in 3-manifold introduced by \textit{P. Ozsváth} and \textit{Z. Szabó} [Adv. Math. 186, No. 1, 58--116 (2004; Zbl 1062.57019)]. For many applications, one needs a concrete chain complex rather than just the homology; however, these complexes are usually very large. The paper at hand deals with knots in the 3-sphere, and introduces the reduced knot Floer complex \(\underline{CFK}^-\), which is significantly smaller. For instance, the reduced complex allows to simplify the computations of knot Floer homology of a connected sum of knots (Theorem 1.1). The author then turns to applications, most notably to L-space knots, i.e. knots that admit a positive surgery which has the same Heegaard Floer homology as a lens space. In particular, he proves that L-space knots are prime and that the Alexander polynomial is a concordance invariant of L-space knots; as a corollary, he recovers a result of Lê, asserting that two knots arising as links of complex curve singularities are concordant if and only if they are isotopic. More generally, the author studies the interplay between the concordance invariant \(\tau\) and Heegaard Floer correction terms of integral surgeries, providing many examples.