Related papers: Exotic Stein fillings with arbitrary fundamental g…

We prove that every continuous map from a Stein manifold X to a complex manifold Y can be made holomorphic by a homotopic deformation of both the map and the Stein structure on X. In the absence of topological obstructions the holomorphic…

Given some type of fibration on a 4-manifold $X$ with a torus regular fiber $T$, we may produce a new 4-manifold $X_T$ by performing torus surgery on $T$. There is a natural way to extend the fibration to $X_T$, but a multiple fiber…

We show that double cosets of the infinite symmetric group with respect to some special subgroups admit natural structures of semigroups. We interpret elements of such semigroups in combinatorial terms (chips, colored graphs,…

A simple characterization is given of open subsets of a complex surface that smoothly perturb to Stein open subsets. As applications, complex 2-space C^2 contains domains of holomorphy (Stein open subsets) that are exotic R^4's, and others…

We study several aspects of fillings for links of general quotient singularities using Floer theory, including co-fillings, Weinstein fillings, strong fillings, exact fillings and exact orbifold fillings, focusing on non-existence of exact…

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…

We study the monodromy diffeomorphism of Milnor fibrations of isolated complex surface singularities, by computing the family Seiberg--Witten invariant of Seifert-fibered Dehn twists using recent advances in monopole Floer homology. More…

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…

We show that any closed oriented 3-manifold can be topologically embedded in some simply-connected closed symplectic 4-manifold, and that it can be made a smooth embedding after one stabilization. As a corollary of the proof we show that…

We prove that all maximal-tb Legendrian torus links (n,m) in the standard contact 3-sphere, except for (2,m),(3,3),(3,4) and (3,5), admit infinitely many Lagrangian fillings in the standard symplectic 4-ball. This is proven by constructing…

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…

An odd-dimensional differentiable manifold is called \emph{holomorphically fillable} if it is diffeomorphic to the boundary of a compact strongly pseudoconvex complex manifold, \emph{Stein fillable} if this last manifold may be chosen to be…

We combine Freedman's topology with Eliashberg's holomorphic theory to construct Stein neighborhood systems in complex surfaces, and use these to study various notions of convexity and concavity. Every tame, topologically embedded 2-complex…

The paper contains a general construction which produces new examples of non simply-connected smooth projective surfaces. We analyze the resulting surfaces and their fundamental groups. Many of these fundamental groups are expected to be…

Here we prove that up to diffeomorphism every compact Stein manifold W of dimension 2n+2>4 admits a Lefschetz fibration over the two-disk with Stein regular fibers, such that the monodromy of the fibration is a symplectomorphism induced by…

We show that any infinite-type surface without planar ends admits arbitrarily large families of length isospectral hyperbolic structures. If the surface has infinite genus and its space of ends is self-similar, we construct an uncountable…

For a Lie group $G=\R^{n}\ltimes_{\phi}\R^{m}$ with the semi-simple action $\phi:\R^{n}\to {\rm Aut}(\R^{m})$, we show that if $\Gamma$ is a finite extension of a lattice of $G$ then $K(\Gamma, 1)$ is formal. Moreover we show that a compact…

Loi-Piergallini and Akbulut-Ozbagci showed that every compact Stein surface admits a Lefschetz fibration over the 2-disk with bounded fibers. In this note we give a more intrinsic alternative proof of this result.

Let $(X,x)$ be a pointed geometrically connected smooth projective variety over a sub-$p$-adic field $K$. For any given rank $n$, we prove that there are only finitely many isomorphism classes of representations…

Let M be a smooth 4-manifold which admits a relatively minimal hyperelliptic genus h Lefschetz fibration over the 2-sphere. If all of the vanishing cycles for this fibration are nonseparating curves, then we show that M is a 2-fold cover of…