Bordered Heegaard Floer Homology and Graph Manifolds

Book excerpt: We use the techniques of bordered Heegaard Floer homology to investigate the Heegaard Floer homology of graph manifolds. Bordered Heegaard Floer homology allows us to split a graph manifold into pieces and perform computations for each piece separately. The resulting invariants can then be combined by a simple algebraic procedure to recover HFhat. Graph manifolds by definition decompose into pieces which are S1-bundles over surfaces. This decomposition makes them particularly well suited to the divide-and-conquer techniques of bordered Heegaard Floer homology. In fact, the problem reduces to computing bordered Heegaard Floer invariants of just two pieces. The first invariant is the type D trimodule associated to the trivial S1-bundle over the pair of pants.