Involutions, links, and Floer cohomologies

Abstract

We develop a version of Seiberg--Witten Floer cohomology/homotopy type for a spin${}^c$ 4-manifold with boundary and with an involution which reverses the spin${}^c$ structure, as well as a version of Floer cohomology/homotopy type for oriented links with non-zero determinant. This framework generalizes the previous work of the authors regarding Floer homotopy type for spin 3-manifolds with involutions and for knots. Based on this Floer cohomological setting, we prove Frøyshov-type inequalities which relate topological quantities of 4-manifolds with certain equivariant homology cobordism invariants. The inequalities and homology cobordism invariants have applications to the topology of unoriented surfaces, Nielsen realization problem for non-spin 4-manifolds, and non-smoothable unoriented surfaces in 4-manifolds.

43 pages, Added Remark 1.19 to mention upcoming work by Arabadji and Baykur on the Nielsen realization problem for non-spin 4-manifolds. Fixed typo in Theorem 1.6