Corks, involutions, and Heegaard Floer homology (Q6172679)

In this paper, Dai, Hedden, and Abhishek use Heegard Floer homology to study corks. A cork is a contractible \(4\)-manifold with an involution on the boundary that does not extend as any diffeomorphism to the entire \(4\)-manifold. A cork is called strong if the involution on the boundary does not extend as a diffeomorphism to any homology ball. The first proofs that certain diffeomorphisms did not extend across used embeddings of these manifolds into closed \(4\)-manifolds and demonstrated that using the diffeomorphism to twist the manifold would result in a different smooth structure. Since Floer theory is the natural setting for gluing results for invariants related to gauge theory, it is natural to expect that cork twists would act in interesting ways on the Floer theory of the boundary. This is indeed the case, but it has been difficult to compute the action of a diffeomorphism on the relevant Floer theory. The authors use involutive Heegaard Floer theory combined with a monotonicity result for the theory under negative definite cobordisms to make conclusions about the action of the diffeomorphism group on the Floer groups. In particular they use the charge conjugation to define a pair of invariants taking values in the group of iota-complexes modulo local equivalence. The authors emphasize the fact that their invariants are \(3\)-dimensional in nature. This paper greatly extends our knowledge of the interaction between cork twists and Floer theory, and uses this new knowledge to exhibit many new examples of strong corks.