Related papers: Lefschetz-Bott fibrations on line bundles over sym…

We classify symplectically foliated fillings of certain foliated manifolds with a contact structure on the leaves. We show that for the foliated sphere cotangent bundle of the Reeb foliation on the three-sphere, the corresponding foliated…

In this paper we give an explicit construction of a symplectic Lefschetz fibration whose total space is a smooth compact four dimensional manifold with a prescribed fundamental group. We also study the numerical properties of the sections…

In this paper we classify symplectic Lefschetz fibrations (with empty base locus) on a four-manifold which is the product of a three-manifold with a circle. This result provides further evidence in support of the following conjecture…

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…

We construct a positive allowable Lefschetz fibration over the disk on any minimal weak symplectic filling of the canonical contact structure on a lens space. Using this construction we prove that any minimal symplectic filling of the…

We describe a Lefschetz fibration of genus one on the disk cotangent bundle of any closed orientable surface S. As a corollary, we obtain an explicit genus one open book decomposition adapted to the canonical contact structure on the unit…

Integral symplectic 4-manifolds may be described in terms of Lefschetz fibrations. In this note we give a formula for the signature of any Lefschetz fibration in terms of the second cohomology of the moduli space of stable curves. As a…

We prove that every strong symplectic filling of a planar contact manifold admits a symplectic Lefschetz fibration over the disk, and every strong filling of the 3-torus similarly admits a Lefschetz fibration over the annulus. It follows…

We consider circle bundles over compact three-manifolds with symplectic total spaces. We show that the base of such a space must be irreducible or the product of the two-sphere with the circle. We then deduce that such a bundle admits a…

We construct open symplectic manifolds which are convex at infinity ("Liouville manifolds") and which are diffeomorphic, but not symplectically isomorphic, to cotangent bundles T^*S^{n+1}, for any n+1 \geq 3. These manifolds are constructed…

We construct using Lefschetz fibrations a large family of contact manifolds with the following properties: Any bounding contact embedding into an exact symplectic manifold satisfying a mild topological assumption is non-displaceable and…

We show that under appropriate hypotheses, a plumbing of symplectic surfaces in a symplectic 4-manifold admits strongly convex neighborhoods. Moreover the neighborhoods are Lefschetz fibered with an easily-described open book on the…

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…

We consider structures analogous to symplectic Lefschetz pencils in the context of a closed 4-manifold equipped with a `near-symplectic' structure (ie, a closed 2-form which is symplectic outside a union of circles where it vanishes…

In this paper we obtain the following results: (1) Any compact Stein surface with boundary embeds naturally into a symplectic Lefschetz fibration over the 2-sphere. (2) There exists a minimal elliptic fibration over the 2-disk, which is not…

Given two open books with equal pages we show the existence of an exact symplectic cobordism whose negative end equals the disjoint union of the contact manifolds associated to the given open books, and whose positive end induces the…

Motivated by the programmes initiated by Taubes and Perutz, we study the geometry of near-symplectic 4-manifolds, i.e., manifolds equipped with a closed 2-form which is symplectic outside a union of embedded 1-dimensional submanifolds, and…

We consider strong symplectic fillings of the unit cotangent bundle of a hyperbolic surface, equipped with its canonical contact structure. We show that every finitely presentable group can be realised as the fundamental group of such a…

We consider product 4--manifolds S^1 X M, where M is a closed, connected and oriented 3-manifold. We prove that if S^1 X M admits a complex structure or a Lefschetz or Seifert fibration, then the following statement is true: S^1 X M admits…

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…