Naturality in sutured monopole and instanton homology (Q2354900)

A balanced sutured manifold \((M,\gamma)\) is a compact oriented \(3\)-manifold \(M\) with boundary, together with a collection \(\gamma \subset \partial M\) of disjoint oriented circles, called the sutures, and a collection of annuli \(A(\gamma)\) comprising a tubular neighborhood of \(\gamma\) in \(\partial M\). A closure of \((M,\gamma)\) is a closed \(3\)-manifold formed by gluing some auxiliary piece to \((M,\gamma)\) and then closing up by identifying the remaining boundary components, together with a distinguished surface in this closed manifold. In [J. Differ. Geom. 84, No. 2, 301--364 (2010; Zbl 1208.57008)], \textit{P. Kronheimer} and \textit{T. Mrowka} defined balanced sutured instanton Floer homology \(SHI(M,\gamma)\) and balanced sutured monopole Floer homology \(SHM(M,\gamma)\) of \((M,\gamma)\). They assigned modules to each such closure, defined in terms of the monopole and instanton Floer groups of the closed manifold relative to the distinguished surface, and they showed that the modules assigned to different closures are isomorphic. The invariant objects they assign to \((M,\gamma)\) are the isomorphism classes, balanced sutured instanton Floer homology \(SHI(M,\gamma)\) and balanced sutured monopole Floer homology \(SHM(M,\gamma)\), of these modules. In this paper, the authors introduce refinements of Kronheimer and Mrowka's invariants which assign much richer algebraic objects -- projectively transitive systems of modules -- to balanced sutured manifolds motivated by a desire to fit these sutured Floer theories into functorial frameworks. Some interesting source categories for such functors, with balanced sutured manifolds as objects, are (i)\, \text{DiffSut}, whose morphisms are isotopy classes of diffeomorphisms of balanced sutured manifolds, (ii)\, \text{CobSut}, whose morphisms are isomorphism classes of smooth cobordisms of balanced sutured manifolds, and (iii)\, \text{ContSut}, where the space of morphisms from \((M,\gamma)\) to \((M',\gamma')\) is empty unless the former is a sutured submanifold of the latter, in which case the morphism space consists of all isotopy classes of contact structures on \(M'\smallsetminus\text{int}(M)\) for which \(\partial M\) and \(\partial M'\) are convex with dividing sets \(\gamma\) and \(\gamma'\). The refinements of \(SHM(M,\gamma)\) and \(SHI(M,\gamma)\) constructed in this paper define functors from \text{DiffSut} to categories of projectively transitive systems which are closely related to the category \(\mathcal{R}\)-Mod of \(\mathcal{R}\)-modules for some commutative ring \(\mathcal{R}\).