Cobordisms of sutured manifolds and the functoriality of link Floer homology

It has been a central open problem in Heegaard Floer theory whether cobordisms of links induce homomorphisms on the associated link Floer homology groups. We provide an affirmative answer by introducing a natural notion of cobordism between sutured manifolds, and showing that such a cobordism induces a map on sutured Floer homology. This map is a common generalization of the hat version of the closed 3-manifold cobordism map in Heegaard Floer theory, and the contact gluing map defined by Honda, Kazez, and Mati´c. We show that sutured Floer homology, together with the above cobordism maps, forms a type of TQFT in the sense of Atiyah. Applied to the sutured manifold cobordism complementary to a decorated link cobordism, our theory gives rise to the desired map on link Floer homology. Hence, link Floer homology is a categorification of the multi-variable Alexander polynomial. We outline an alternative definition of the contact gluing map using only the contact element and handle maps. Finally, we show that a Weinstein sutured manifold cobordism preserves the contact element.