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Based on work of Rasmussen [Ras03], we construct a concordance invariant associated to the knot Floer complex, and exhibit examples in which this invariant gives arbitrarily better bounds on the 4-ball genus than the Ozsv ́ath-Szab ́o τ invariant.

Given an element in the first homology of a rational homology 3-sphere Y, one can consider the minimal rational genus of all knots in this homology class. This defines a function Θ on H1(Y;Z), which was introduced by Turaev as an analogue of Thurston norm. We will give a lower bound for this function using the correction terms in Heegaard Floer homology. As a corollary, we show that Floer simple knots in L-spaces are genus minimizers in their homology classes, hence answer questions of Turaev and Rasmussen about genus minimizers in lens spaces.

Two Dehn surgeries on a knot are called purely cosmetic, if they yield manifolds that are homeomorphic as oriented manifolds. Suppose there exist purely cosmetic surgeries on a knot in S^3, we show that the two surgery slopes must be the opposite of each other. One ingredient of our proof is a Dehn surgery formula for correction terms in Heegaard Floer homology.

We study the rigidity of polyhedral surfaces and the moduli space of polyhedral surfaces using variational principles. Curvaturelike quantities for polyhedral surfaces are introduced and are shown to determine the polyhedral metric up to isometry. The action functionals in the variational approaches are derived from the cosine law. They can be considered as 2-dimensional counterparts of the Schlaefli formula.