Sign refinement for combinatorial link Floer homology (Q945675)

Heegard-Floer homology is an invariant of closed oriented 3-maifolds that was introduced in joint work by P. Ozsváth and Z. Szabó, and then extended to an invariant of null-homologous oriented links in such manifolds by these same authors and independently by J. Rasmussen. Recently, a combinatorial description of this invariant was given by C. Manolescu, P. Ozsváth and S. Sarkar, and these authors and D. Thurston used this combinatorial description to prove that it is a topological invariant. In the paper under review, the author gives an alternative combinatorial decription of link Floer homology with \(\mathbb{Z}\) coefficients. The main new ingredient is a 2-cohomology class introduced by using a spin extension of the permutation group, that is, a nontrivial extension of that group by \(\mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z}\).