Related papers: How to recognise a 4-ball when you see one
Consider a symplectic surface in a three-dimensional contact manifold with boundary on Reeb orbits (periodic orbits of the Reeb vector field). We assume that the rotation numbers of the boundary Reeb orbits satisfy a certain inequality, and…
We study holomorphic spheres in certain symplectic cobordisms and derive information about periodic Reeb orbits in the concave end of these cobordisms from the non-compactness of the relevant moduli spaces. We use this to confirm the strong…
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 establish an existence $h$-principle for symplectic cobordisms of dimension $2n>4$ with concave overtwisted contact boundary.
Each lens space has a canonical contact structure which lifts to the distribution of complex lines on the three-sphere. In this paper, we show that a symplectic homology cobordism between two lens spaces, which is given with the canonical…
We exhibit a distinctly low-dimensional dynamical obstruction to the existence of Liouville cobordisms: for any contact 3-manifold admitting an exact symplectic cobordism to the tight 3-sphere, every nondegenerate contact form admits an…
We give a dynamical characterisation of odd-dimensional balls within the class of all contact manifolds whose boundary is a standard even-dimensional sphere. The characterisation is in terms of the non-existence of short periodic Reeb…
In this article, we extend the methods from arXiv:2011.06568, where the five dimensional analogue of the three dimensional finite energy foliations introduced by Hofer--Wysocki--Zehnder was identified, to the case where there the underlying…
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…
Consider a holomorphic contact manifold. Holomorphic discs tangent to the contact planes define a pseudometric on the manifold. This pseudometric integrates to a pseudodistance. When the pseudodistance is a distance, we call the contact…
We characterise boundary shaped disc like neighbourhoods of certain isotropic submanifolds in terms of aperiodicity of Reeb flows. We prove uniqueness of homotopy and diffeomorphism type of such contact manifolds assuming non-existence of…
We classify four-dimensional manifolds endowed with symplectic pairs admitting embedded symplectic spheres with non-negative self-intersection, following the strategy of McDuff's classification of rational and ruled symplectic four…
In this note we make several observations concerning symplectic cobordisms. Among other things we show that every contact 3-manifold has infinitely many concave symplectic fillings and that all overtwisted contact 3-manifolds are…
We study Reeb dynamics on the three-sphere equipped with a tight contact form and an anti-contact involution. We prove the existence of a symmetric periodic orbit and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for it to bound an invariant…
Given a symplectic 4-manifold with an almost toric fibration and a symplectic ball embedding whose image under the moment map is contained in an affine convex set R, we produce a symplectomorphism between the almost toric blow-up and the…
We prove the uniqueness, up to diffeomorphism, of symplectically aspherical fillings of the unit cotangent bundle of odd-dimensional spheres. As applications, we first show the non-existence of exact symplectic cobordisms between some…
We study relative symplectic cobordisms between contact submanifolds, and in particular relative symplectic cobordisms to the empty set, that we call hats. While we make some observations in higher dimensions, we focus on the case of…
The main result of this paper states that a symplectic s-cobordism of elliptic 3-manifolds is diffeomorphic to a product (assuming a canonical contact structure on the boundary). Based on this theorem, we conjecture that a smooth…
Given two four-dimensional symplectic manifolds, together with knots in their boundaries, we define an ``anchored symplectic embedding'' to be a symplectic embedding, together with a two-dimensional symplectic cobordism between the knots…
We give a classification of generic coadjoint orbits for the groups of symplectomorphisms and Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of a closed symplectic surface. We also classify simple Morse functions on symplectic surfaces with respect to actions…