Abstract:Heegaard Floer homology is an invariant of 3-manifolds defined by counting holomorphic curves. We explain how to extend it to an effective invariant of 3-manifolds with paramaterized boundary: to the boundary surface F we associate a differential graded algebra A(F), and the invariant of the manifold with boundary is a differential module over A(F), well defined up to homotopy equivalence. In this talk we focus on the toy model setting of planar grid diagrams.
This is joint work with Robert Lipshitz and Peter Ozsv‡th.