Dynamics of gradient flows in the half-transversal Morse theory (Q1014378)

This paper is a research announcement; full proofs and discussion of most of these results can be found in \textit{H.~Goda} and \textit{A.~V.~Pajitnov} [Morse-Novikov theory, Heegaard splittings and closed orbits of gradient flows, arXiv:0709.3153 (2007)]. Morse-Novikov theory generally begins with a Morse function \(f\) (real or circle-valued) and a gradient-like vector field \(v\) satisfying the transversality condition that the ascending and descending manifolds at each critical point meet transversely. This paper is primarily concerned with the introduction and application of a relaxed transversality condition, called `half-transversality'. The first half of the paper summarises some results from the literature relating circle-valued Morse-Novikov theory, torsion invariants, Lefschetz zeta functions (counting closed orbits of a vector field), and Seiberg-Witten invariants. Briefly, the generating function of the Seiberg-Witten invariants of \(M\) is equal to the product of the torsion invariant of the Novikov complex of \((f,v)\) and the Lefschetz zeta function of \(v\). The authors then announce that these results still hold (at least in dimension 3) if the usual transversality condition is replaced by half-transversality. The major advantage of this new condition is that it ensures the existence of a regular value \(\lambda\) such that the gradient flow gives a well-defined monodromy diffeomorphism \(H: f^{-1}(\lambda) \to f^{-1}(\lambda)\) (in the usual setting the monodromy map is only partially defined), and both the Novikov complex and the Lefschetz zeta function can be entirely computed in terms of \(H\). A subsidiary theme of the paper is twisted analogues of the relation between the Lefschetz zeta function and Novikov complexes, where the twisting is by a representation of \(\pi_1 M\) over \(\mathbb{Z}((t))\). Finally, the authors illustrate the computational power of half-transversal Morse-Novikov theory with some example computations of zeta functions and torsion invariants for two knot complements: the knot \(K_{2n-1}\) and the pretzel knot of type (5,5,5).