Related papers: Mapping class group relations, Stein fillings, and…

The space of topological decompositions into triangulations of a surface has a natural graph structure where two triangulations share an edge if they are related by a so-called flip. This space is a sort of combinatorial Teichm\"uller space…

We study codimension $1$ embeddings preserving open book structures. In particular, we prove that every closed orientable 3-manifold admits a codimension-1 spun embedding in a finite connected sum of $S^2 \times S^2$s and $S^2…

The algorithm given by Akbulut-Ozbagci constructs an explicit open book decomposition on a contact three-manifold described by a contact surgery on a link in the three-sphere. In this article, we will improve this algorithm by using…

The aim of this paper is to address the following question: given a contact manifold $(\Sigma, \xi)$, what can be said about the aspherical symplectic manifolds $(W, \omega)$ bounded by $(\Sigma, \xi)$ ? We first extend a theorem of…

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…

We define an invariant of contact structures in dimension three from Heegaard Floer homology. This invariant takes values in the set $\mathbb{Z}_{\geq0}\cup\{\infty\}$. It is zero for overtwisted contact structures, $\infty$ for Stein…

In this paper, we show that the Ozsv\'ath-Szab\'o contact invariant $c^+(\xi)\in HF^+(-Y)$ of a contact 3-manifold $(Y,\xi)$ can be calculated combinatorially if $Y$ is the boundary of a certain type of plumbing $X$, and $\xi$ is induced by…

We study contact structures compatible with genus one open book decompositions with one boundary component. Any monodromy for such an open book can be written as a product of Dehn twists around dual non-separating curves in the…

We study neighborhoods of configurations of symplectic surfaces in symplectic 4-manifolds. We show that suitably `positive' configurations have neighborhoods with concave boundaries and we explicitly describe open book decompositions of the…

This article is the author's contribution to the volume "Problems on mapping class groups and related topics" which will be published in December 2006, with Benson Farb as Editor. Various individuals were invited by Farb to submit open…

In this paper we compute the mapping class group of simply-connected closed smooth manifolds $M$ with integral homology $H_{*}(M) \cong \mathbb Z \oplus \mathbb Z \oplus \mathbb Z$ provided that $\dim M \ne 4$.

We give a bordism-theoretic characterisation of those closed almost contact (2q+1)-manifolds (with q > 2) which admit a Stein fillable contact structure. Our method is to apply Eliashberg's h-principle for Stein manifolds in the setting of…

In this note we introduce the (homologically essential) arc complex of a surface as a tool for studying properties of open book decompositions and contact structures. After characterizing destabilizability in terms of the essential…

In this short note, we give examples of binding sums of contact 3-manifolds that do not preserve properties such as tightness or symplectic fillability. We also prove vanishing of the Heegaard Floer contact invariant for an infinite family…

We introduce the notion of a nested open book, a submanifold equipped with an open book structure compatible with an ambient open book, and describe in detail the special case of a push-off of the binding of an open book. This enables us to…

In this paper we describe a general strategy for approaching the Weinstein conjecture in dimension three. We apply this approach to prove the Weinstein conjecture for a new class of contact manifolds (planar contact manifolds). We also…

If (S,h) is an open book with disconnected binding then we can form a new open book (S',h') by capping off one of the boundary components of S with a disk. We define a U-equivariant map on Heegaard Floer homology which sends c^+(S',h') to…

This paper has 3 principal goals: (1) to survey what is know about mapping class and Torelli groups of simply connected compact Kaehler manifolds, (2) supplement these results, and (3) present a list of questions and open problems to…

In this paper, we introduce the notions of an iterated planar Lefschetz fibration and an iterated planar open book decomposition and prove the Weinstein conjecture for contact manifolds supporting an open book that has iterated planar…

Let X be a Stein manifold, A a closed complex subvariety of X, and f a continuous map from X to a complex manifold Y whose restriction to A is holomorphic. After a homotopic deformation of the Stein structure outside a neighborhood of A in…