Contact handles, duality, and sutured Floer homology

Abstract

We give an explicit construction of the Honda--Kazez--Mati\'c gluing maps in terms of contact handles. We use this to prove a duality result for turning a sutured manifold cobordism around, and to compute the trace in the sutured Floer TQFT. We also show that the decorated link cobordism maps on the hat version of link Floer homology defined by the first author via sutured manifold cobordisms and by the second author via elementary cobordisms agree.