Heegaard Floer homology and maximal twisting numbers

Abstract

We adapt the Ozsváth-Szabó full path algorithm to every star-shaped graph and establish a correspondence between negative-twisting tight contact structures on any Seifert fibred space over $S^2$, and its Heegaard Floer homology groups equipped with the Alexander filtration induced by the regular fibre. This provides the complete classification of negative-twisting structures on these manifolds; in particular, we distinguish them by their contact invariant $c^{+}$. We prove that every such structure is symplectically fillable and extend a known obstruction to Stein fillability. In addition, we show that the number of negative-twisting structures can be expressed combinatorially in terms of the Seifert coefficients of the star-shaped graph, while their $d_3$-invariant and homotopy type are determined explicitly through our correspondence. Our results also complete the classification of fillable structures on any small Seifert fibred space.

v2: Corrected a minor imprecision in Proposition 1.12. Improved proofs in Sections 5,6 and 7