Combinatorial tangle Floer homology (Q511595)

Heegaard Floer homology is an invariant of closed 3-manifolds introduced by Ozsváth and Szabó. Later, Lipshitz, Ozsváth, and Thurston introduced a pair of invariants for 3-manifolds with boundary; the Heegaard Floer homology of the closed manifold obtained by gluing two manifolds with boundary can be recovered from the bordered invariants of two component pieces. Knot Floer homology is a further refinement of Heegaard Floer homology associated to a link in a closed 3-manifold, introduced by Ozsváth and Szabó, and independently, Rasmussen. In this paper, the authors define invariants associated to tangles in 3-manifolds with boundary, analogous to the bordered Floer homology construction above. In particular, they define modules \(\widehat{CFTA}(T)\) and \(\widehat{CFDT}(T)\) of a tangle \(T\) in \(D^3\), that are topological tangle invariants, behave well under tangle compositions, and can be combinatorially computed. The authors prove that if \(T_1\) and \(T_2\) are tangles in \(D^3\) with \(\partial T_1 = -\partial T_2\), then \[ \widehat{CFK}(K) \otimes W \simeq \widehat{CFTA}(T_1)\;\tilde{\otimes}\;\widehat{CFDT}(T_2), \] where \(\widehat{CFK}(K)\) is the chain complex for the knot Floer homology of the knot \(K\) obtained by composing the two tangles, and \(W\) is a 2-dimensional vector space. The paper contains similar results for tangles in other 3-manifolds. The authors also define an enhanced version of their modules over larger base rings, which they call the \textit{minus} version (parallel to the distinction between \(\widehat{HF}\) and \(HF^-\) in Heegaard Floer homology). The authors do not prove their main results for the minus version, but give evidence as to why a combinatorial proof might be expected.