Related papers: Higher dimensional contact topology via holomorphi…
This is a set of expository lecture notes created originally for a graduate course on holomorphic curves taught at ETH Zurich and the Humboldt University Berlin in 2009/2010. The notes are still incomplete, but due to recent requests from…
This is the preliminary manuscript of a book on symplectic field theory based on a lecture course for PhD students given in 2015-16. It covers the essentials of the analytical theory of punctured pseudoholomorphic curves, taking the…
We construct infinitely many non-diffeomorphic examples of $5$-dimensional contact manifolds which are tight, admit no strong fillings, and do not have Giroux torsion. We obtain obstruction results for symplectic cobordisms, for which we…
We prove several results on weak symplectic fillings of contact 3-manifolds, including: (1) Every weak filling of any planar contact manifold can be deformed to a blow up of a Stein filling. (2) Contact manifolds that have fully separating…
In this paper we give explicit, handle-by-handle constructions of concave symplectic fillings of all closed, oriented contact 3-manifolds. These constructions combine recent results of Giroux relating contact structures and open book…
This article describes various moduli spaces of pseudoholomorphic curves on the symplectization of a particular overtwisted contact structure on S^1 x S^2. This contact structure appears when one considers a closed self dual form on a…
An important class of contact 3--manifolds are those that arise as links of rational surface singularities with reduced fundamental cycle. We explicitly describe symplectic caps (concave fillings) of such contact 3--manifolds. As an…
By a result of Eliashberg, every symplectic filling of a three-dimensional contact connected sum is obtained by performing a boundary connected sum on another symplectic filling. We prove a partial generalization of this result for…
We exhibit tight contact structures on 3-manifolds that do not admit any symplectic fillings.
In recent times a great amount of progress has been achieved in symplectic and contact geometry, leading to the development of powerful invariants of 3-manifolds such as Heegaard Floer homology and embedded contact homology. These…
This article sketches various ideas in contact geometry that have become useful in low-dimensional topology. Specifically we (1) outline the proof of Eliashberg and Thurston's results concerning perturbations of foliatoins into contact…
In this paper, we investigate the minimal symplectic fillings of small Seifert 3-manifolds with a canonical contact structure. As a result, we classify all minimal symplectic fillings of small Seifert 3-manifolds satisfying certain…
In this paper, we study confoliations in dimensions higher than three mostly from the perspective of symplectic fillability. Our main result is that Massot-Niederkr\"uger-Wendl's bordered Legendrian open book, an object that obstructs the…
We prove that certain non-exact magnetic Hamiltonian systems on products of closed hyperbolic surfaces and with a potential function of large oscillation admit non-constant contractible periodic solutions of energy below the Ma\~n\'e…
We show that simply connected contact manifolds that are subcritically Stein fillable have a unique symplectically aspherical filling up to diffeomorphism. Various extensions to manifolds with non-trivial fundamental group are discussed.…
This is a revision of some expository lecture notes written originally for a 5-hour minicourse on the intersection theory of punctured holomorphic curves and its applications in 3-dimensional contact topology. The main lectures are aimed…
We prove a result which establishes restrictions on the pseudoholomorphic curves which can exist in a stable Hamiltonian manifold in the presence of certain $\mathbb{R}$-invariant foliations of the symplectization by holomorphic…
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…
We prove a contact non-squeezing phenomenon on homotopy spheres that are fillable by Liouville domains with infinite dimensional symplectic homology: there exists a smoothly embedded ball in such a sphere that cannot be made arbitrarily…
Symplectic fillings of standard tight contact structures on lens spaces are understood and classified. The situation is different if one considers non-standard tight structures (i.e. those that are virtually overtwisted), for which a…