| Abstract: I will describe recent joint work with Ko Honda and Will Kazez defining and exploring an invariant of a contact 3-manifold with convex boundary. This invariant lives in the sutured version of Heegaard Floer Homology defined by Andras Juhasz and generalizes the contact invariant of Ozsvath and Szabo in the closed case. We will first describe the connection between contact structures and open book decompositions on closed manifolds, then introduce a notion of a partial open book decomposition for a manifold with sutured boundary, and describe connection to contact structures with convex boundary. We will then use this connection to define the corresponding contact invariants. We will conclude by exploring some properties of the invariants and applications. |