Lattice cohomology and Seiberg-Witten invariants of normal surface singularities

Abstract

One of the main questions in the theory of normal surface singularities is to understand the relations between their geometry and topology. The lattice cohomology is an important tool in the study of topological properties of a plumbed 3-manifold M associated with a connected negative definite plumbing graph G. It connects the topological properties with analytic ones when M is realized as a singularity link, i.e. when G is a good resolution graph of the singularity. Its computation is based on the (Riemann-Roch) weights of the lattice points of \Z^s, where s is the number of vertices of G. The first part of the thesis reduces the rank of this lattice to the number of `bad' vertices of the graph. Usually, the geometry/topology of M is encoded exactly by these `bad' vertices and their number measures how far the plumbing graph stays from a rational one. In the second part, we identify the following three objects: the Seiberg-Witten invariant of a plumbed 3-manifold, the periodic constant of its topological Poincare series, and a coefficient of an equivariant multivariable Ehrhart polynomial. For this, we construct the corresponding polytope from the plumbing graph, together with an action of H_1(M,\Z), and we develop Ehrhart theory for them. The effect of the reduction appears also at the level of the multivariable topological Poincare series, simplifying the corresponding polytope and the Ehrhart theory as well. We end the thesis with detailed calculations and examples.