Abstract
We recently defined invariants of contact –manifolds using a version of instanton Floer homology for sutured manifolds. In this paper, we prove that if several contact structures on a –manifold are induced by Stein structures on a single –manifold with distinct Chern classes modulo torsion then their contact invariants in sutured instanton homology are linearly independent. As a corollary, we show that if a –manifold bounds a Stein domain that is not an integer homology ball then its fundamental group admits a nontrivial homomorphism to . We give several new applications of these results, proving the existence of nontrivial and irreducible representations for a variety of –manifold groups.
Citation
John A Baldwin. Steven Sivek. "Stein fillings and $\mathrm{SU}(2)$ representations." Geom. Topol. 22 (7) 4307 - 4380, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2140/gt.2018.22.4307
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