Contact invariants in sutured monopole and instanton homology

Kronheimer and Mrowka recently used monopole Floer homology to define an invariant of sutured manifolds, following work of Juhász in Heegaard Floer homology. In this talk, I will construct an invariant of a contact structure on a 3-manifold with boundary as an element of the associated sutured monopole homology group. I will discuss several interesting properties of this invariant, including gluing maps and an exact triangle associated to bypass attachment, and explain how this construction leads to an invariant in the sutured version of instanton Floer homology as well. This is joint work with John Baldwin.