scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1057265

Recently Kronheimer and Mrowka have announced a version of Floer homology for Seiberg-Witten theory and conjectured a relationship between the Euler characteristic \(\chi_{SWF}(Y)\) of this homology for a closed oriented Riemannian homology \(3\)-sphere \(Y\), and the Casson invariant \(\lambda (Y)\), as follows: \[ \lambda (Y)=\chi_{SWF}(Y)- \biggl( \text{index }D_W +\frac{1}{8}\text{sign} (W)\biggr) \tag{1} \] where \(D_W\) is the Dirac operator (with Atiyah-Patodi-Singer boundary conditions) of a compact Spin Riemannian \(4\)-manifold bounded by \(Y\) and \(\text{sign}(W)\) is the Hirzebruch signature of \(W\). The correction term depends only on \(Y\), by work of Atiyah-Patodi-Singer. In particular the right side of (1) should be independent of the Riemannian metric. Since the correction term is known to depend on the metric, the same would, therefore, be true of \(\chi_{SWF}(Y)\). In the present paper some progress is made toward proving the conjecture. First of all a careful definition of \(\chi_{SWF}(Y)\) is given and it is shown that the right side of (1), denoted \(\alpha (Y)\), is, indeed, independent of the metric. It is then shown that \(\alpha (Y)\equiv\lambda (Y)\bmod 2\), which is just the Rokhlin invariant of \(Y\), and that changing the orientation of \(Y\) changes the sign of \(\alpha (Y)\).

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