The concordance invariant tau in link grid homology

Abstract

We introduce a generalization of the Ozsv\'ath-Szab\'o $\tau$-invariant to links by studying a filtered version of link grid homology. We prove that this invariant remains unchanged under strong concordance and we show that it produces a lower bound for the slice genus of a link. We show that this bound is sharp for torus links and we also give an application to Legendrian link invariants in the standard contact 3-sphere.