We construct infinitely many compact, smooth 4-manifolds which are homotopy equivalent to $S^{2}$ but do not admit a spine (that is, a piecewise linear embedding of $S^{2}$ that realizes the homotopy equivalence). This is the remaining case in the existence problem for codimension-2 spines in simply connected manifolds. The obstruction comes from the Heegaard Floer $d$ invariants.

We use Heegaard Floer homology to define an invariant of homology cobordism. This invariant is isomorphic to a summand of the reduced Heegaard Floer homology of a rational homology sphere equipped with a spin structure and is analogous to Stoffregen’s connected Seiberg–Witten Floer homology. We use this invariant to study the structure of the homology cobordism group and, along the way, compute the involutive correction terms $\bar{d}$ and $\text{}\underline{d}$ for certain families of three-manifolds.

In this note, we collect various properties of Seifert homology spheres from the viewpoint of Dehn surgery along a Seifert fiber. We expect that many of these are known to various experts, but include them in one place, which we hope will be useful in the study of concordance and homology cobordism.

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 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.