Towards extended Floer field theories

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Guillem Cazassus, Indiana University
Fine Hall 314

Donaldson polynomials are powerful invariants associated to smooth four-manifolds. The introduction by Floer of Instanton homology groups, associated to some 3-manifolds, allowed to define analogs of such polynomials for (some) four-manifolds with boundary, that have a structure similar with a TQFT.

Wehrheim and Woodward developed a framework called "Floer field theory" which, according to the Atiyah-Floer conjecture, should permit to recover Donaldson invariants from a 2-functor from the 2-category Cob_{2+1+1} to a 2-category Symp they defined, which is an enrichment of Weinstein's symplectic category.

I will describe a framework that should permit to extend such a 2-functor to lower dimensions. This framework should permit to define new invariants in Manolescu and Woodward's symplectic instanton homology (sutured theory, equivariant version). This is work in progress.