Naturality of the contact invariant in monopole Floer homology under strong symplectic cobordisms (Q784249)

Let \(Y\) be a closed, oriented, connected \(3\)-manifold. To a contact structure \(\xi\) there is associated a Spin\(^c\)-structure \({\mathfrak s}_\xi\) and a contact invariant \(c(\xi)\in \widehat{HM}^*(Y,{\mathfrak s}_\xi)\cong \widehat{HM}_*(-Y,{\mathfrak s}_\xi)\) in monopole Floer homology. For a symplectic cobordism \(W\) between contact manifolds \((Y,\xi)\) and \((Y^\prime,\xi^\prime)\) one has a homomorphism \(\widehat{HM}_*(W^\dagger,{\mathfrak s}_W)\colon \widehat{HM}_*(-Y,{\mathfrak s}_\xi)\to \widehat{HM}_*(-Y^\prime,{\mathfrak s}_{\xi^\prime})\). A strong symplectic cobordism is a symplectic cobordism for which the symplectic structure in collar neighborhoods of the convex and concave boundaries is given by symplectizations of the corresponding contact structures. The paper under review proves that under this assumption \(\widehat{HM}_*(W^\dagger,{\mathfrak s}_W)\) sends \(c(\xi)\) to \(c(\xi^\prime)\). This had been conjectured for about ten years. As corollaries one gets new proofs of \(c(\xi)=0\) for overtwisted contact structures and \(c(\xi)\not=0\) for strongly fillable contact structures. It is also proved that a strong filling of a contact manifold which is an L-space must be negative definite.