Corks, involutions, and Heegaard Floer homology

Invariants of 4-manifolds (including Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten invariants) (57K41) Group actions on manifolds and cell complexes in low dimensions (57M60) Cobordism and concordance in PL-topology (57Q60) Floer homology (57R58)

Abstract: Building on the algebraic framework developed by Hendricks, Manolescu, and Zemke, we introduce and study a set of Floer-theoretic invariants aimed at detecting corks. Our invariants obstruct the extension of a given involution over any homology ball, rather than a particular contractible manifold. Unlike previous approaches, we do not utilize any closed 4-manifold topology or contact topology. Instead, we adapt the formalism of local equivalence coming from involutive Heegaard Floer homology. As an application, we define a modification

T h e t a_{m a t h b b Z}^{a u}

of the homology cobordism group which takes into account an involution on each homology sphere, and prove that this admits a

m a t h b b Z^{i} n f t y

-subgroup of strongly non-extendable corks. The group

T h e t a_{m a t h b b Z}^{a u}

can also be viewed as a refinement of the bordism group of diffeomorphisms. Using our invariants, we furthermore establish several new families of corks and prove that various known examples are strongly non-extendable. Our main computational tool is a monotonicity theorem which constrains the behavior of our invariants under equivariant negative-definite cobordisms, and an explicit method of constructing such cobordisms via equivariant surgery.

Review text

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.

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