Monopole Floer homology, link surgery, and odd Khovanov homology

We construct a link surgery spectral sequence for all versions of monopole Floer homology with mod 2 coefficients, generalizing the exact triangle. The spectral sequence begins with the monopole Floer homology of a hypercube of surgeries on a 3-manifold Y, and converges to the monopole Floer homology of Y itself. This allows one to realize the latter group as the homology of a complex over a combinatorial set of generators. Our construction relates the topology of link surgeries to the combinatorics of graph associahedra, leading to new inductive realizations of the latter. As an application, given a link L in the 3-sphere, we prove that the monopole Floer homology of the branched double-cover arises via a filtered perturbation of the differential on the reduced Khovanov complex of a diagram of L. The associated spectral sequence carries a filtration grading, as well as a mod 2 grading which interpolates between the delta grading on Khovanov homology and the mod 2 grading on Floer homology. Furthermore, the bigraded isomorphism class of the higher pages depends only on the Conway-mutation equivalence class of L. We constrain the existence of an integer bigrading by considering versions of the spectral sequence with non-trivial U action, and determine all monopole Floer groups of branched double-covers of links with thin Khovanov homology. Motivated by this perspective, we show that odd Khovanov homology with integer coefficients is mutation invariant. The proof uses only elementary algebraic topology and leads to a new formula for link signature that is well-adapted to Khovanov homology