Related papers: A Note on Lefschetz Fibrations on Compact Stein 4-…

Using theorems of Eliashberg and McDuff, Etnyre [Et] proved that the intersection form of a symplectic filling of a contact 3-manifold supported by planar open book is negative definite. In this paper, we prove a signature formula for…

We prove that any genus-2 Lefschetz fibration without reducible fibers and with ``transitive monodromy'' is holomorphic. The latter condition comprises all cases where the number of singular fibers is not congruent to 0 modulo 40. An…

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 initiate a study of positive multisections of Lefschetz fibrations via positive factorizations in framed mapping class groups of surfaces. Using our methods, one can effectively capture various interesting symplectic surfaces in…

In a previous work, we introduced a simple and systematic method for constructing a positive allowable Lefschetz fibration (PALF) from a 2-handlebody decomposition of a given Stein surface. In this paper, we present a combinatorial…

Symplectic four-manifolds give rise to Lefschetz fibrations, which are determined by monodromy representations of free groups in mapping class groups. We study the topology of Lefschetz fibrations by analysing the action of the monodromy on…

The topology of broken Lefschetz fibrations is studied by means of handle decompositions. We consider a slight generalization of round handles, and describe the handle diagrams for all that appear in dimension four. We establish simplified…

We show that there exists an admissible nonorientable genus $g$ Lefschetz fibration with only one singular fiber over a closed orientable surface of genus $h$ if and only if $g \geq 4$ and $h \geq 1$.

For each g > 2 and h > 1, we explicitly construct (1) fiber sum indecomposable relatively minimal genus g Lefschetz fibrations over genus h surfaces whose monodromies lie in the Torelli group, (2) fiber sum indecomposable genus g surface…

We show how certain stabilizations produce infinitely many closed oriented 4-manifolds which are the total spaces of genus g surface bundles (resp. Lefschetz fibrations) over genus h surfaces and have non-zero signature, but do not admit…

We construct using Lefschetz fibrations a large family of contact manifolds with the following properties: Any bounding contact embedding into an exact symplectic manifold satisfying a mild topological assumption is non-displaceable and…

This is a summary of some of the basic facts about flat 2-orbifold groups, otherwise known as 2-dimensional crystallographic groups. We relate the geometric and topological presentations of these groups, and consider structures…

In this note we observe that one can contact embed all contact 3-manifolds into a Stein fillable contact structure on the twisted $S^3$-bundle over $S^2$ and also into a unique overtwisted contact structure on $S^3\times S^2$. These results…

We show that hyperelliptic symplectic Lefschetz fibrations are symplectically birational to two-fold covers of rational ruled surfaces, branched in a symplectically embedded surface. This reduces the classification of genus 2 fibrations to…

We introduce hyperelliptic simplified (more generally, directed) broken Lefschetz fibrations, which is a generalization of hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations. We construct involutions on the total spaces of such fibrations of genus $g\geq…

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 describe a Lefschetz fibration of genus one on the disk cotangent bundle of any closed orientable surface S. As a corollary, we obtain an explicit genus one open book decomposition adapted to the canonical contact structure on the unit…

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 develop a technique for gluing relative trisection diagrams of $4$-manifolds with nonempty connected boundary to obtain trisection diagrams for closed $4$-manifolds. As an application, we describe a trisection of any closed $4$-manifold…

We present existence results for certain singular 2-dimensional foliations on 4-manifolds. The singularities can be chosen to be simple, e.g. the same as those that appear in Lefschetz pencils. There seems to be a wealth of such creatures…