An introduction to knot Floer homology

Ciprian Manolescu

Published 2014-01-28, updated 2016-03-17Version 2

This is a survey article about knot Floer homology. We present three constructions of this invariant: the original one using holomorphic disks, a combinatorial description using grid diagrams, and a combinatorial description in terms of the cube of resolutions. We discuss the geometric information carried by knot Floer homology, and the connection to three- and four-dimensional topology via surgery formulas. We also describe some conjectural relations to Khovanov-Rozansky homology.