Chern-Simons functional and the homology cobordism group (Q2217889)

Seiberg-Witten theory is a very powerful gauge theory. It however has not replaced Yang-Mills theory, especially in the context of the associated Floer theories. This excellent paper introduces a new tool into Floer theory that has no analogue in the Seiberg-Witten or Heegaard Floer settings. As a rough approximation Instanton Floer theory may be viewed as the Morse homology of the Chern-Simons (CS) functional. The analogous functional in the Seiberg-Witten setting is the Chern-Simons-Dirac (CSD) functional. While the CSD functional depends upon a metric, the CS functional does not. Using the topological invariance of CS, Daemi extracts a powerful new \(3\)-manifold invariant. This Gamma invariant is a function from the integers into the reals union infinity. Roughly it is a measure of the mininal energy of a trajectory with ends determined by a flat connection that has a non-trivial number of trajectories joining it to the trivial connection after cutting down by some number of copies of the point class. The rather technical definition of the invariant appears on the twenty-seventh page of the paper. It uses three equivariant flavors of instanton Floer theory. The paper begins with eight pages describing properties of the Gamma invariant. It is a powerful homology cobordism invariant generalizing the Frøyshov instanton invariant. One powerful property is that when there is a negative definite rational homology cobordism from a first homology sphere to a second homology sphere, the Gamma invariant of the second is less or equal to the Gamma invariant of the first with equality only possible if the fundamental group of the cobordism admits a non-trivial SU(2) representation extending representations of the fundamental groups of the boundary components. It obstructs the intersection forms of negative-definite 4-manifolds that the given 3-manifold can bound. Combining these two results gives a different way to understand the Taubes' end-periodic version of Donaldson's theorem. For sums of Seifert fiber spaces, Daemi relates the Gamma invariant to the Fintushel-Stern R-invariant. This recovers Furuta's result that the homology cobordism group contains an infinite rank subgroup. Daemi also computes the Gamma invariant for the negative of the 2-fold branched cover of the Whitehead double of a torus knot. Daemi does a great favor to all readers of this paper. Namely, he ends it with an appendix containing a finite-dimensional model analogue of the Gamma invariant in the context of Morse homology.