We develop a skein exact sequence for knot Floer homology, involving singular knots. This leads to an explicit, algebraic description of knot Floer homology in terms of a braid projection of the knot.
Knot Floer homology is an invariant for knots discovered by the authors and, independently, Jacob Rasmussen. The discovery of this invariant grew naturally out of studying how a certain three-manifold invariant, Heegaard Floer homology, changes as the three-manifold undergoes Dehn surgery along a knot. Since its original definition, thanks to the contributions of many researchers, knot Floer homology has emerged as a useful tool for studying knots in its own right. We give here a few selected highlights of this theory, and then move on to some new algebraic developments in the computation of knot Floer homology.
We obtain a formula for the Heegaard Floer homology (hat theory) of the three-manifold $Y(K_1,K_2)$ obtained by splicing the complements of the knots $K_isubset Y_i$, $i=1,2$, in terms of the knot Floer homology of $K_1$ and $K_2$. We also present a few applications. If $h_n^i$ denotes the rank of the Heegaard Floer group $widehat{mathrm{HFK}}$ for the knot obtained by $n$-surgery over $K_i$ we show that the rank of $widehat{mathrm{HF}}(Y(K_1,K_2))$ is bounded below by $$big|(h_infty^1-h_1^1)(h_infty^2-h_1^2)- (h_0^1-h_1^1)(h_0^2-h_1^2)big|.$$ We also show that if splicing the complement of a knot $Ksubset Y$ with the trefoil complements gives a homology sphere $L$-space then $K$ is trivial and $Y$ is a homology sphere $L$-space.
Knot Floer homology is a knot invariant defined using holomorphic curves. In more recent work, taking cues from bordered Floer homology,the authors described another knot invariant, called bordered knot Floer homology, which has an explicit algebraic and combinatorial construction. In the present paper, we extend the holomorphic theory to bordered Heegaard diagrams for partial knot projections, and establish a pairing result for gluing such diagrams, in the spirit of the pairing theorem of bordered Floer homology. After making some model calculations, we obtain an identification of a variant of knot Floer homology with its algebraically defined relative. These results give a fast algorithm for computing knot Floer homology.
We prove that the LOSS and GRID invariants of Legendrian links in knot Floer homology behave in certain functorial ways with respect to decomposable Lagrangian cobordisms in the symplectization of the standard contact structure on $mathbb{R}^3$. Our results give new, computable, and effective obstructions to the existence of such cobordisms.
We modify the construction of knot Floer homology to produce a one-parameter family of homologies for knots in the three-sphere. These invariants can be used to give homomorphisms from the smooth concordance group to the integers, giving bounds on the four-ball genus and the concordance genus of knots. We give some applications of these homomorphisms.