Related papers: Four-manifolds admitting hyperelliptic broken Lefs…
We develop techniques to construct explicit symplectic Lefschetz fibrations over the 2-sphere with any prescribed signature and any spin type when the signature is divisible by 16. This solves a long-standing conjecture on the existence of…
We introduce multisections of smooth, closed 4-manifolds, which generalize trisections to decompositions with more than three pieces. This decomposition describes an arbitrary smooth, closed 4-manifold as a sequence of cut systems on a…
We construct branched double coverings by certain direct products of manifolds for connected sums of copies of sphere bundles over the 2-sphere. As an application we answer a question of Kotschick and Loeh up to dimension five. More…
We classify totally geodesic submanifolds in Hopf-Berger spheres, which constitute a special family of homogeneous spaces diffeomorphic to spheres constructed via Hopf fibrations. As a byproduct of our investigations, we have discovered…
A foliation $(M,\mathcal{F})$ is said to be $2$--calibrated if it admits a closed 2-form $\omega$ making each leaf symplectic. By using approximately holomorphic techniques, a sequence $W_k$ of $2$--calibrated submanifolds of…
We show that for each k > 3 there are infinitely many finite type Stein manifolds diffeomorphic to Euclidean space R^{2k} which are pairwise distinct as symplectic manifolds.
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 prove an upper bound for the first Betti number of a nontrivial genus-$g$ Lefschetz fibration. We also show that if the monodromy of a Lefschetz fibration is transitive with respect to the mapping class group, the Lefschetz fibration is…
The Heegaard genus of a 3-manifold, as well as the growth of Heegaard genus in its finite sheeted cover spaces, has extensively been studied in terms of algebraic, geometric and topological properties of the 3-manifold. This note shows that…
Spinal open book decompositions provide a natural generalization of open book decompositions. We show that any minimal symplectic filling of a contact 3-manifold supported by a planar spinal open book is deformation equivalent to the…
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…
Donaldson showed that every closed symplectic 4-manifold can be given the structure of a topological Lefschetz pencil. Gay and Kirby showed that every closed 4-manifold has a trisection. In this paper we relate these two structure theorems,…
We prove that symplectic 4-manifolds with $b_1 = 0$ and $b^+ > 1$ have nonvanishing Donaldson invariants, and that the canonical class is always a basic class. We also characterize in many situations the basic classes of a Lefschetz…
It is known that there are surface bundles of arbitrarily high genus which have genus two Heegaard splittings. The simplest examples are Seifert fibered spaces with the sphere as a base space, three exceptional fibers and which allow…
By studying the Higgs bundle equations with the gauge group replaced by the group of symplectic diffeomorphisms of the 2-sphere we encounter the notion of a folded hyperkaehler 4-manifold and conjecture the existence of a family of such…
We construct an invariant of closed ${\rm spin}^c$ 4-manifolds using families of Seiberg-Witten equations. This invariant is formulated as a cohomology class on a certain abstract simplicial complex consisting of embedded surfaces of a…
Simon Donaldson and Ivan Smith recently studied symplectic surfaces in symplectic 4-manifolds X by introducing an invariant DS associated to any Lefschetz fibration on blowups of X which counts holomorphic sections of a relative Hilbert…
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…
Given a symplectic manifold $(M^{2n},\omega)$ we study Lagrangian cobordisms $V\subset E$ where $E$ is the total space of a Lefschetz fibration having $M$ as generic fiber. We prove a generation result for these cobordisms in the…
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…