We prove for the first time that knot Floer homology and Khovanov homology can detect non-fibered knots and that HOMFLY homology detects infinitely many knots; these theories were previously known to detect a mere six knots, all fibered. These results rely on our main technical theorem, which gives a complete classification of genus-1 knots in the 3-sphere whose knot Floer homology in the top Alexander grading is 2-dimensional. We discuss applications of this classification to problems in Dehn surgery which are carried out in two sequels. These include a proof that $0$-surgery characterizes infinitely many knots, generalizing results of Gabai from his 1987 resolution of the Property R Conjecture.

Quasi-alternating links of determinant 1, 2, 3 and 5 were previously classified by Greene and Teragaito, who showed that the only such links are two-bridge. In this paper, we extend this result by showing that all quasi-alternating links of determinant at most 7 are connected sums of two-bridge links, which is optimal since there are quasi-alternating links not of this form for all larger determinants. We achieve this by studying their branched double covers and characterising distance-one surgeries between lens spaces of small order, leading to a classification of formal L-spaces with order at most 7.

We define an invariant of contact 3-manifolds with convex boundary using Kronheimer and Mrowka’s sutured monopole Floer homology theory ( $SHM$ ). Our invariant can be viewed as a generalization of Kronheimer and Mrowka’s contact invariant for closed contact 3-manifolds and as the monopole Floer analogue of Honda, Kazez, and Matić’s contact invariant in sutured Heegaard Floer homology ( $SFH$ ). In the process of defining our invariant, we construct maps on $SHM$ associated to contact handle attachments, analogous to those defined by Honda, Kazez, and Matić in $SFH$ . We use these maps to establish a bypass exact triangle in $SHM$ analogous to Honda’s in $SFH$ . This paper also provides the topological basis for the construction of similar gluing maps in sutured instanton Floer homology, which are used in Baldwin and Sivek [Selecta Math. (N.S.), 22(2) (2016), 939–978] to define a contact invariant in the instanton Floer setting.

We apply results from both contact topology and exceptional surgery theory to study when Legendrian surgery on a knot yields a reducible manifold. As an application, we show that a reducible surgery on a non-cabled positive knot of genus $g$ must have slope $2g-1$, leading to a proof of the cabling conjecture for positive knots of genus 2. Our techniques also produce bounds on the maximum Thurston–Bennequin numbers of cables.