This is the last of five papers that construct an isomorphism between the Seiberg–Witten
Floer homology and the Heegaard Floer homology of a given compact, oriented
–manifold.
See Theorem 1.4 for a precise statement. As outlined in paper I (Geom. Topol. 24 (2020)
2829–2854), this isomorphism is given as a composition of three isomorphisms. In this
article, we establish the third isomorphism, which relates the Seiberg–Witten Floer
homology on the auxiliary manifold with the appropriate version of Seiberg–Witten
Floer homology on the original manifold. This constitutes Theorem 4.1 in paper I,
restated in a more refined form as Theorem 1.1 below. The tool used in the
proof is a filtered variant of the connected sum formula for Seiberg–Witten
Floer homology, in special cases where one of the summand manifolds is
(referred to as “handle-addition” in all five articles in this series). Nevertheless, the
arguments leading to the aforementioned connected sum formula are general enough
to establish a connected sum formula in the wider context of Seiberg–Witten Floer
homology with nonbalanced perturbations. This is stated as Proposition 6.7 here.
Although what is asserted in this proposition has been known to experts for some
time, a detailed proof has not appeared in the literature, and therefore of some
independent interest.