Related papers: On Non-Separating Contact Hypersurfaces in Symplec…

We generalize the familiar notions of overtwistedness and Giroux torsion in 3-dimensional contact manifolds, defining an infinite hierarchy of local filling obstructions called planar torsion, whose integer-valued order $k \ge 0$ can be…

We consider constraints on the topology of closed 3-manifolds that can arise as hypersurfaces of contact type in standard symplectic $R^4$. Using an obstruction derived from Heegaard Floer homology we prove that no Brieskorn homology sphere…

We show that the pre-order defined on the category of contact manifolds by arbitrary symplectic cobordisms is considerably less rigid than its counterparts for exact or Stein cobordisms: in particular, we exhibit large new classes of…

We observe that nonzero Gromov-Witten invariants with marked point constraints in a closed symplectic manifold imply restrictions on the homology classes that can be represented by contact hypersurfaces. As a special case, contact…

We prove several results on weak symplectic fillings of contact 3-manifolds, including: (1) Every weak filling of any planar contact manifold can be deformed to a blow up of a Stein filling. (2) Contact manifolds that have fully separating…

In this survey article we describe different ways of embedding fillings of contact 3-manifolds into closed symplectic 4-manifolds.

We construct infinitely many non-diffeomorphic examples of $5$-dimensional contact manifolds which are tight, admit no strong fillings, and do not have Giroux torsion. We obtain obstruction results for symplectic cobordisms, for which we…

We derive an obstruction to representing a homology class of a symplectic 4-manifold by an embedded, possibly disconnected, symplectic surface.

We exhibit tight contact structures on 3-manifolds that do not admit any symplectic fillings.

The purpose of this paper is to present some results on the existence of homologous, nonisotopic symplectic or lagrangian surfaces embedded in a simply connected symplectic 4-dimensional manifold.

In this article we study proper symplectic and iso-symplectic embeddings of $4$--manifolds in $6$--manifolds. We show that a closed orientable smooth $4$--manifold admitting a Lefschetz fibration over $\C P^1$ admits a symplectic embedding…

We show that any closed oriented 3-manifold can be topologically embedded in some simply-connected closed symplectic 4-manifold, and that it can be made a smooth embedding after one stabilization. As a corollary of the proof we show that…

These notes are based on a course that took place at the Universit\'e de Nantes in June 2011 during the "Trimester on Contact and Symplectic Topology". We will explain how holomorphic curves can be used to study symplectic fillings of a…

In this paper we construct non-simply connected contact manifolds $M$ of dimension $\geq5$ such that $M\times S^1$ does not admit a symplectic structure.

We construct four-dimensional symplectic cobordisms between contact three-manifolds generalizing an example of Eliashberg. One key feature is that any handlebody decomposition of one of these cobordisms must involve three-handles. The other…

We show that there exist infinitely many closed contact 3-manifolds containing half Giroux torsion along a separating torus whose contact invariants do not vanish. This provides counterexamples to Ghiggini's conjecture and suggests that…

We construct examples in any odd dimension of contact manifolds with finite and non-zero algebraic torsion (in the sense of Latschev-Wendl), which are therefore tight and do not admit strong symplectic fillings. We prove that Giroux torsion…

We study symplectic surfaces in ruled symplectic 4-manifolds which are disjoint from a given symplectic section. As a consequence we see that, in any symplectic 4-manifold, two homologous symplectic surfaces which are sufficiently C^0 close…

We prove that every strong symplectic filling of a planar contact manifold admits a symplectic Lefschetz fibration over the disk, and every strong filling of the 3-torus similarly admits a Lefschetz fibration over the annulus. It follows…

We extract a nonnegative integer-valued invariant, which we call the "order of algebraic torsion", from the Symplectic Field Theory of a closed contact manifold, and show that its finiteness gives obstructions to the existence of symplectic…