Corks, involutions, and Heegaard Floer homology

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 $\Theta^{\tau}_{\mathbb{Z}}$ of the homology cobordism group which takes into account an involution on each homology sphere, and prove that this admits a $\mathbb{Z}^\infty$-subgroup of strongly non-extendable corks. The group $\Theta^{\tau}_{\mathbb{Z}}$ 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.