Symplectic Geometry
We use Floer homology to study the Hofer-Zehnder capacity of neighborhoods near a closed symplectic submanifold M of a geometrically bounded and symplectically aspherical ambient manifold. We prove that, when the unit normal bundle of M is…
We use contact handle decompositions and a stabilization process to compute the cylindrical contact homology of a subcritical Stein-fillable contact manifold with vanishing first Chern class, and show that it is completely determined by the…
For each compact almost Kahler manifold $(X,\om,J)$ and an element A of $H_2(X;Z)$, we describe a closed subspace $\ov{\frak M}_{1,k}^0(X,A;J)$ of the moduli space $\ov{\frak M}_{1,k}(X,A;J)$ of stable J-holomorphic genus-one maps such that…
Consider a Hamiltonian action of a compact Lie group H on a compact symplectic manifold (M,w) and let G be a subgroup of the diffeomorphism group Diff(M). We develop techniques to decide when the maps on rational homotopy and rational…
We compute the genus zero family Gromov-Witten invariants for K3 surfaces using the topological recursion formula and the symplectic sum formula for a degeneration of elliptic K3 surfaces. In particular we verify the Yau-Zaslow formula for…
The symplectomorphism group of a 2-dimensional surface is homotopy equivalent to the orbit of a filling system of curves. We give a generalization of this statement to dimension 4. The filling system of curves is replaced by a decomposition…
Let S^3_r(K) be the oriented 3--manifold obtained by rational r-surgery on a knot K in S^3. Using the contact Ozsvath-Szabo invariants we prove, for a class of knots K containing all the algebraic knots, that S^3_r(K) carries positive,…
Simon Donaldson and Ivan Smith recently studied symplectic surfaces in symplectic 4-manifolds X by introducing an invariant DS associated to any Lefschetz fibration on blowups of X which counts holomorphic sections of a relative Hilbert…
We introduce in this paper a field theory on symplectic manifolds that are fibered over a real surface with interior marked points and cylindrical ends. We assign to each such object a morphism between certain tensor products of quantum and…
This is one in a series of papers devoted to the foundations of Symplectic Field Theory sketched in [Y Eliashberg, A Givental and H Hofer, Introduction to Symplectic Field Theory, Geom. Funct. Anal. Special Volume, Part II (2000) 560--673].…
We define an simple invariant of an embedded nullhomologous Lagrangian torus and use this invariant to show that many symplectic 4-manifolds have infinitely many pairwise symplectically inequivalent nullhomologous Lagrangian tori. We…
We prove that an infinite family of virtually overtwisted tight contact structures discovered by Honda on certain circle bundles over surfaces admit no symplectic semi-fillings. The argument uses results of Mrowka, Ozsvath and Yu on the…
We calculate the Heegaard Floer homologies for three-manifolds obtained by plumbings of spheres specified by certain graphs. Our class of graphs is sufficiently large to describe, for example, all Seifert fibered rational homology spheres.…
We use the criteria of Lalonde and McDuff to show that a path that is generated by a generic autonomous Hamiltonian is length minimizing with respect to the Hofer norm among all homotopic paths provided that it induces no non-constant…
We study Lefschetz pencils on symplectic four-manifolds via the associated spheres in the moduli spaces of curves, and in particular their intersections with certain natural divisors. An invariant defined from such intersection numbers can…
In this paper we discuss the topology of the symplectomorphism group of a product of two 2-dimensional spheres when the ratio of their areas lies in the interval (1,2]. More precisely we compute the homotopy type of this symplectomorphism…
As was recently pointed out by McMullen and Taubes [Math. Res. Lett. 6 (1999) 681-696], there are 4-manifolds for which the diffeomorphism group does not act transitively on the deformation classes of orientation-compatible symplectic…
We construct an exotic monotone Lagrangian torus in CP^2 using techniques motivated by mirror symmetry. We show that it bounds 10 families of Maslov index 2 holomorphic discs, and it follows that this exotic torus is not Hamiltonian…
A two-dimensional open book (S,h) determines a closed, oriented three-manifold Y(S,h) and a contact structure C(S,h) on Y(S,h). The contact structure C(S,h) is Stein fillable if h is positive, i.e. h can be written as a product of…
This note corrects one serious mistake and several smaller mistakes from arXiv:math/0502404. The main results of that paper are unchanged.