Floer homology and right-veering monodromy

Abstract

We prove that the knot Floer complex of a fibered knot detects whether the monodromy of its fibration is right-veering. In particular, this leads to a purely knot Floer-theoretic characterization of tight contact structures, by the work of Honda, Kazez, and Matic. Our proof makes use of the relationship between the Heegaard Floer homology of mapping tori and the symplectic Floer homology of area-preserving surface diffeomorphisms. We describe applications of this work to Dehn surgeries and taut foliations.