Heegaard Floer genus bounds for Dehn surgeries on knots

Abstract

We provide a new obstruction for a rational homology 3-sphere to arise by Dehn surgery on a given knot in the 3-sphere. The obstruction takes the form of an inequality involving the genus of the knot, the surgery coefficient, and a count of L-structures on the 3-manifold, that is spin-c structures with the simplest possible associated Heegaard Floer group. Applications include an obstruction for two framed knots to yield the same 3-manifold, an obstruction that is particularly effective when working with families of framed knots. We introduce the rational and integral Dehn surgery genera for a rational homology 3-sphere, and use our inequality to provide bounds, and in some cases exact values, for these genera. We also demonstrate that the difference between the integral and rational Dehn surgery genera can be arbitrarily large.