Gauge Theory and Topology: Immersed curve invariants for knot complements

Gauge Theory and Topology Seminar, SEMINARS

Speaker:

Jonathan Hanselman - Princeton University

Bordered Floer homology is an extension of Heegaard Floer homology to manifolds with parametrized boundary, and in the case of manifolds with torus boundary knot Floer homology gives another such extension. In earlier joint work with J. Rasmussen and L. Watson, it was shown that in this setting the bordered Floer invariant, which is equivalent to the UV=0 truncation of the knot Floer complex, can be encoded geometrically as a collection of immersed curves in the punctured torus and a pairing theorem recovers HF-hat (the simplest version of Heegaard Floer homology) of a glued manifold via Floer homology of immersed curves. In this talk, we will survey some applications of this result and then discuss a generalization that encodes the full knot Floer complex of a knot as a collection of decorated immersed curves in the torus. When two manifolds with torus boundary are glued, a pairing theorem computes HF^- of the resulting manifold as the Floer homology of certain immersed curves associated with each side. We remark that the curves we describe are invariants of knots, but we expect they are in fact invariants of the knot complements; if this is true, they may be viewed as defining a minus type bordered Floer invariant for manifolds with torus boundary.