Related papers: Representing homology classes by symplectic surfac…
We develop the theory of the diagrammatics of surface cross sections to prove that there are an infinite number of homology 3-spheres smoothly embeddable in a homology 4-sphere but not in a homotopy 4-sphere. Our primary obstruction comes…
We give an overview of various recent results concerning the topology of symplectic 4-manifolds and singular plane curves, using branched covers and isotopy problems as a unifying theme. While this paper does not contain any new results, we…
We define a family of symplectic invariants which obstruct exact symplectic embeddings between Liouville manifolds, using the general formalism of linearized contact homology and its L-infinity structure. As our primary application, we…
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…
We prove that every symplectic 4-manifold admits a trisection that is compatible with the symplectic structure in the sense that the symplectic form induces a Weinstein structure on each of the three sectors of the trisection. Along the…
In this paper, the symplectic genus for any 2-dimensional class in a 4-manifold admitting a symplectic structure is introduced, and its relation with the minimal genus is studied. It is used to describe which classes in rational and…
We construct an infinite family of homologous, non-isotopic, symplectic surfaces of any genus greater than one in a certain class of closed, simply connected, symplectic four-manifolds. Our construction is the first example of this…
In this paper, we demonstrate a relation among Seiberg-Witten invariants which arises from embedded surfaces in four-manifolds whose self-intersection number is negative. These relations, together with Taubes' basic theorems on the…
In a previous paper, we obtained a cohomological obstruction to the existence of compact manifolds locally modelled on a homogeneous space. In this paper, we give a classification of the semisimple symmetric spaces to which this obstruction…
We show that complex symplectic structures need not be preserved under small deformations, and we find sufficient conditions for this to happen. We study various cohomologies of compact complex symplectic manifolds, obtaining some…
We present a handlebody construction of small symplectic caps, and hence of small closed symplectic 4-manifolds. We use this to construct handlebody descriptions of symplectic embeddings of rational homology balls in…
A symplectic form is called hyperbolic if its pull-back to the universal cover is a differential of a bounded one-form. The present paper is concerned with the properties and constructions of manifolds admitting hyperbolic symplectic forms.…
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 certain classes of contact 3-manifolds do not admit non-separating contact type embeddings into any closed symplectic 4-manifolds, e.g. this is the case for all contact manifolds that are (partially) planar or have Giroux…
It is a well known fact that every embedded symplectic surface $\Sigma$ in a symplectic 4-manifold $(X^4,\omega)$ can be made $J$-holomorphic for some almost-complex structure $J$ compatible with $\omega$. In this paper we investigate when…
An obstruction theory for representing homotopy classes of surfaces in 4-manifolds by immersions with pairwise disjoint images is developed, using the theory of non-repeating Whitney towers. The accompanying higher-order intersection…
In this paper we show that there exists a family of simply connected, symplectic 4-manifolds such that the (Poincare dual of the) canonical class admits both connected and disconnected symplectic representatives. This answers a question…
A venerable problem in combinatorics and geometry asks whether a given incidence relation may be realized by a configuration of points and lines. The classic version of this would ask for algebraic lines over some field or possibly real…
We classify small contractions of (holomorphically) symplectic 4-folds.
In this paper we show that there exist simply connected symplectic 4-manifolds which contain infinitely many knotted lagrangian tori, i.e. lagrangian embeddings of tori that are homotopic but not isotopic. Moreover, the homology class they…