Related papers: Monodromy Substitutions and Rational Blowdowns

We prove that if a symplectic 4-manifold $X$ becomes a rational 4-manifold after applying rational blow-down surgery, then the symplectic 4-manifold $X$ is originally rational. That is, a symplectic rational blow-up of a rational symplectic…

In this paper we give a necessary combinatorial condition for a negative--definite plumbing tree to be suitable for rational blow--down, or to be the graph of a complex surface singularity which admits a rational homology disk smoothing.…

Kodaira's classification of singular fibers in elliptic fibrations and its translation into the language of monodromies and Lefschetz fibrations has been a boon to the study of 4-manifolds. In this article, we begin the work of translating…

In this paper we show that to each planar line arrangement defined over the real numbers, for which no two lines are parallel, one can write down a corresponding relation on Dehn twists that can be read off from the combinatorics and…

In this article we construct a new family of simply connected symplectic 4-manifolds with $b_2^+ =1$ and $c_1^2 =2$ which are not diffeomorphic to rational surfaces by using rational blow-down technique. As a corollary, we conclude that a…

Shapes of four dimensional spaces can be studied effectively via maps to standard surfaces. We explain, and illustrate by quintessential examples, how to simplify such generic maps on 4-manifolds topologically, in order to derive simple…

We introduce new symplectic cut-and-paste operations that generalize the rational blowdown. In particular, we will define $k$-replaceable plumbings to be those that, heuristically, can be symplectically replaced by Euler characteristic $k$…

In this paper, we focus on contact structures supported by planar open book decompositions. We study right-veering diffeomorphisms to keep track of overtwistedness property of contact structures under some monodromy changes. As an…

In this paper we introduce a surgical procedure, called a rational blowdown, for a smooth 4-manifold X and determine how this procedure affects both the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten invariants of X.

We find a new relation among right-handed Dehn twists in the mapping class group of a $k$-holed torus for $4 \leq k \leq 9$. This relation induces an elliptic Lefschetz pencil structure on the four-manifold \cp $#(9-k)$ \cpb $ $ with $k$…

We use Picard-Lefschetz theory to introduce a new local model for the planar projective twists $\tau_{\mathbb{A}\mathbb{P}^2} \in \mathrm{Symp}_{ct}(T^*\mathbb{A}\mathbb{P}^2), \ \mathbb{A} \in \{ \mathbb{R}, \mathbb{C} \}$. In each case,…

We study algebraic isomonodromic deformations of flat logarithmic connections on the Riemann sphere with $n\geq 4$ poles, for arbitrary rank. We introduce a natural property of algebraizability for the germ of universal deformation of such…

We show that isotopy classes of simple closed curves in any oriented surface admit a quandle structure with operations induced by Dehn twists, the Dehn quandle of the surface. We further show that the monodromy of a Lefschetz fibration can…

We compute the mapping class group-valued monodromy of any sufficiently ample linear system on any smooth simply connected projective surface, identifying this with the r-spin mapping class group associated to a maximal root of the adjoint…

A complete description of the global monodromy of a Lefschetz fibration arising from the Fermat surface of degree 4 is given. As a by-product we get a positive relation among right hand Dehn twists in the mapping class group of a closed…

We prove that if a contact 3-manifold admits an open book decomposition of genus 0, a certain intersection pattern cannot appear in the homology of any of its minimal symplectic fillings, and moreover, fillings cannot contain symplectic…

Inspired by pioneering work of Ky\^uya Masuda in the 1980s, only much more recent PDE studies address global boundedness versus finite-time blow-up in complex time. The two phenomena are related by passage from real to purely imaginary…

We verify that the rational blow-down schemes along certain Seifert fibered 3-manifolds found by the second author, Szabo and Wahl are, in fact, symplectic operations.

In this article, we generalize the results discussed in [arXiv:1004.3762] by introducing a genus to generic fibers of Lefschetz fibrations. That is, we give families of relations in the mapping class groups of genus-1 surfaces with…

The Riemann-Hilbert approach to studying solutions of supergravity theories allows us to associate spacetime independent monodromy matrices (matrices in the Geroch group) with solutions that effectively only depend on two spacetime…