Symplectic Geometry

Using a knot concordance invariant from the Heegaard Floer theory of Ozsvath and Szabo, we obtain new bounds for the Thurston-Bennequin and rotation numbers of Legendrian knots in S^3. We also apply these bounds to calculate the knot…

In principle, Floer theory can be extended to define homotopy invariants of families of equivalent objects (e.g. Hamiltonian isotopic symplectomorphisms, 3-manifolds, Legendrian knots, etc.) parametrized by a smooth manifold B. The…

Using contact surgery we define families of contact structures on certain Seifert fibered three-manifolds. We prove that all these contact structures are tight using contact Ozsath-Szabo invariants. We use these examples to show that, given…

Engel structures on M x S^1 and M x I are studied in this paper, where M is a 3-dimensional manifold. We suppose that these structures have characteristic line fields parallel to the fibres, S^1 or I. It is proved that they are…

We demonstrate that the operation of taking disjoint unions of J-holomorphic curves (and thus obtaining new J-holomorphic curves) has a Seiberg-Witten counterpart. The main theorem asserts that, given two solutions (A_i, psi_i), i=0,1 of…

We prove that the generalized rational blowdown, a surgery on smooth 4-manifolds, can be performed in the symplectic category.

We study weak versus strong symplectic fillability of some tight contact structures on torus bundles over the circle. In particular, we prove that almost all of these tight contact structures are weakly, but not strongly symplectically…

In a well known work [Se], Graeme Segal proved that the space of holomorphic maps from a Riemann surface to a complex projective space is homology equivalent to the corresponding continuous mapping space through a range of dimensions…

We characterize the closed, oriented, Seifert fibered 3-manifolds which are oriented boundaries of Stein manifolds. We also show that for this class of 3-manifolds the existence of Stein fillings is equivalent to the existence of symplectic…

We define a "sutured topological quantum field theory", motivated by the study of sutured Floer homology of product 3-manifolds, and contact elements. We study a rich algebraic structure of suture elements in sutured TQFT, showing that it…

We give here some extensions of Gromov's and Polterovich's theorems on $\karea$ of $ \mathbb{CP} ^{n}$, particularly in the symplectic and Hamiltonian context. Our main methods involve Gromov-Witten theory, and some connections with Bott…

We show that for any convex surface S in a contact 3-manifold, there exists a metric on S and a neighbourhood contact isotopic to $S \times I$ with contact structure given as $\ker(ud - \star du)$ where u is an eigenfunction of the…

We describe families of monotone symplectic manifolds constructed via the symplectic cutting procedure of Lerman from the cotangent bundle of manifolds endowed with a free circle action. We also give obstructions to the monotone Lagrangian…

Let a torus T act effectively on a compact connected cooriented contact manifold, and let Psi be the natural momentum map on the symplectization. We prove that, if dim T > 2, the union of the origin with the image of Psi is a convex…

The action--Maslov homomorphism $I\co\pi_1(\text{Ham}(X,\omega))\to\R$ is an important tool for understanding the topology of the Hamiltonian group of monotone symplectic manifolds. We explore conditions for the vanishing of this…

In this paper, we write down a special Heegaard diagram for a given product three manifold $\Sigma_g\times S^1$. We use the diagram to compute its perturbed Heegaard Floer homology.

We introduce a notion of positive pair of contact structures on a 3-manifold which generalizes a previous definition of Eliashberg-Thurston and Mitsumatsu. Such a pair gives rise to a locally integrable plane field $\lambda$. We prove that…

We study symplectic Laplacians on compact symplectic manifolds with boundary. These Laplacians are associated with symplectic cohomologies of differential forms and can be of fourth-order. We introduce several natural boundary conditions on…

We prove that the length of the boundary of a $J$-holomorphic curve with Lagrangian boundary conditions is dominated by a constant times its area. The constant depends on the symplectic form, the almost complex structure, the Lagrangian…

This is an expository account of some applications of string topology to the study of Lagrangian embeddings into symplectic manifolds, originally due to Fukaya, which was written as a contribution to a book on free loop spaces.