Related papers: Broken Lefschetz fibrations and mapping class grou…

We show that any homologically non-trivial Dehn twist of a compact surface F with boundary is the lifting of a half-twist in the braid group B_n, with respect to a suitable branched covering p : F -> B^2. In particular, we allow the surface…

We characterize regularity of Lagrangian submanifolds in Weinstein Lefschetz fibrations, establishing a conjecture of Giroux and Pardon. Our main result is the Weinstein analogue of a closed symplectic Lefschetz pencil result of Auroux,…

We show that any 4-manifold, after surgery on a curve, admits an achiral Lefschetz fibration. In particular, we show that the connected sum of any simply connected 4-manifold with a 2-sphere bundle over the 2-sphere will admit an achiral…

We investigate the bounded cohomology of Lefschetz fibrations. If a Lefschetz fibration has regular fiber of genus at least 2 and it has at least two distinct vanishing cycles, we show that its Euler class is not bounded. As a consequence,…

In this short note, we give an explicit construction of inequivalent Lefschetz pencils and fibrations of same genera on blow-ups of all rational and ruled surfaces. This complements our earlier results, concluding that every symplectic…

We provide a closed, simply connected, symplectic $6$-manifold having infinitely many codimension $2$ symplectic submanifolds. These are mutually homologous but homotopy inequivalent, and furthermore, they cannot admit complex structures.…

We construct examples of Lefschetz fibrations with prescribed singular fibers. By taking differences of pairs of such fibrations with the same singular fibers, we obtain new examples of surface bundles over surfaces with non-zero signature.…

In this paper we discuss topological properties of holomorphic Lefschetz pencils on the four-torus. Relying on the theory of moduli spaces of polarized abelian surfaces, we first prove that, under some mild assumption, the (smooth)…

In analogy with the vector bundle theory we define universal and strongly universal Lefschetz fibrations over bounded surfaces. After giving a characterization of these fibrations we construct very special strongly universal Lefschetz…

The existence of a positive allowable Lefschetz fibration on a compact Stein surface with boundary was established by Loi and Piergallini by using branched covering techniques. Here we give an alternative simple proof of this fact and…

We introduce several new families of relations in the mapping class groups of planar surfaces, each equating two products of right-handed Dehn twists. The interest of these relations lies in their geometric interpretation in terms of…

This paper is a survey of the authors' recent results on "abc-surfaces" and the monodromy of their natural Lefschetz fibrations and projections to P^1 x P^1, see (arXiv:0910.2142). The results being surveyed explore various fundamental…

We compute the topological mapping class group of every compact, simply connected, topological 4-manifold. This was previously only known in the closed case. If the 4-manifold is smooth, we deduce an analogous description of the stable…

In this paper, we introduce the notions of an iterated planar Lefschetz fibration and an iterated planar open book decomposition and prove the Weinstein conjecture for contact manifolds supporting an open book that has iterated planar…

In his Ph.D. thesis, Burak Ozbagci described an algorithm computing signatures of Lefschetz fibrations where the input is a factorization of the monodromy into a product of Dehn twists. In this note, we give a reformulation of Ozbagci's…

We obtain infinitely many (non-conjugate) representations of 3-manifold fundamental groups into a lattice in the holomorphic isometry group of complex hyperbolic space. The lattice is an orbifold fundamental group of a branched covering of…

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…

In this second paper of a two-part series, we prove that whenever a contact 3-manifold admits a uniform spinal open book decomposition with planar pages, its (weak, strong and/or exact) symplectic and Stein fillings can be classified up to…

Every finitely presented group is the fundamental group of the total space of a Lefschetz fibration. This follows from results of Gompf and Donaldson, and was also proved by Amoros-Bogomolov-Katzarkov-Pantev. We give another proof by…

This is a summary of some of the basic facts about flat 2-orbifold groups, otherwise known as 2-dimensional crystallographic groups. We relate the geometric and topological presentations of these groups, and consider structures…