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The aim of this paper is to use mapping class group relations to approach the `geography' problem for Stein fillings of a contact 3-manifold. In particular, we adapt a formula of Endo and Nagami so as to calculate the signature of such…

We prove that any symplectic 4-manifold which is not a rational or ruled surface, after sufficiently many blow-ups, admits an arbitrary number of nonisomorphic Lefschetz fibrations of the same genus which cannot be obtained from one another…

We draw connections between the field of contact topology and the study of Beltrami fields in hydrodynamics on Riemannian manifolds in dimension three. We demonstrate an equivalence between Reeb fields (vector fields which preserve a…

In this paper we write explicitly the open book decompositions of links of quotient surface singularities supporting the corresponding unique Milnor fillable contact structure. The page-genus of these Milnor open books are minimal among all…

We show that any ruled surface $X$ with $\chi(X) < 0$ admits infinitely many inequivalent Lefschetz pencils of fixed genus and number of base points. Our proof proceeds by building infinitely many inequivalent Lefschetz fibrations on a…

It is known by A. Loi and R. Piergallini that a closed, oriented, smooth 3-manifold is Stein fillable if and only if it has a positive open book decomposition. In the present paper we will show that for every link L in a Stein fillable…

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…

We introduce the notion of a nested open book, a submanifold equipped with an open book structure compatible with an ambient open book, and describe in detail the special case of a push-off of the binding of an open book. This enables us to…

The topology of broken Lefschetz fibrations is studied by means of handle decompositions. We consider a slight generalization of round handles, and describe the handle diagrams for all that appear in dimension four. We establish simplified…

In "Proof of the Arnold chord conjecture in three dimensions I", we deduced the Arnold chord conjecture in three dimensions from another result, which asserts that an exact symplectic cobordism between contact three-manifolds induces a map…

Fibered multilinks are a generalization of classical fibered knots and open books that arise in the study of surface singularities and Milnor fibrations. We prove that if the canonical contact structure on the link of a surface singularity…

Using recent work on high dimensional Lutz twists and families of Weinstein structures we show that any almost contact structure on a 5-manifold is homotopic to a contact structure.

Given a closed connected Riemannian manifold M and a connected Riemannian manifold N, we study fiberwise volume decreasing diffeomorphisms on the product M x N. Our main theorem shows that in the presence of certain cohomological condition…

In a previous work, we introduced a simple and systematic method for constructing a positive allowable Lefschetz fibration (PALF) from a 2-handlebody decomposition of a given Stein surface. In this paper, we present a combinatorial…

Generalizing the well-known Shafarevich hyperbolicity conjecture, it has been conjectured by Viehweg that a quasi-projective manifold that admits a generically finite morphism to the moduli stack of canonically polarized varieties is…

If (S,h) is an open book with disconnected binding then we can form a new open book (S',h') by capping off one of the boundary components of S with a disk. We define a U-equivariant map on Heegaard Floer homology which sends c^+(S',h') to…

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.

We classify tight contact structures on the small Seifert fibered 3--manifold M(-1; r_1, r_2, r_3) with r_i in (0,1) and r_1, r_2 \geq 1/2. The result is obtained by combining convex surface theory with computations of contact…

We observe that nonzero Gromov-Witten invariants with marked point constraints in a closed symplectic manifold imply restrictions on the homology classes that can be represented by contact hypersurfaces. As a special case, contact…

We prove that Witten's Conjecture [arXiv:hep-th/9411102] on the relationship between the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten series for a four-manifold of Seiberg-Witten simple type with $b_1=0$ and odd $b_2^+\geq 3$ follows from our…