Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

I plan to discuss a method for defining Heegaard Floer invariants for 3-manifolds. The construction is inspired by contact geometry and has several interesting immediate applications to the study of tight contact structures on noncompact 3-manifolds. In this talk, I'll focus on one basic examples and indicate how one defines a contact invariant which can be used to give an alternate proof of James Tripp's classification of tight, minimally twisting contact structures on the open solid torus. This is joint work with John B. Etnyre and Rumen Zarev.