Related papers: From flops to diffeomorphism groups

We construct (infinitely many) examples in all dimensions of contactomorphisms of closed overtwisted contact manifolds that are smoothly isotopic but not contact-isotopic to the identity.

We study groups of formal diffeomorphisms in several complex variables. For abelian, metabelian or nilpotent groups we investigate the existence of suitable formal vector fields and closed differential forms which exhibit an invariance…

We prove, for a class of contact manifolds, that the universal cover of the group of contact diffeomorphisms carries a natural partial order. It leads to a new viewpoint on geometry and dynamics of contactomorphisms. It gives rise to…

We build the first examples of diffeomorphisms that are distorted in a group of $C^r$ diffeomorphisms yet undistorted in the corresponding group of $C^s$ diffeomorphisms, where $r < s$. This explicit construction is performed for the closed…

We use differential forms on loop spaces to prove that the fundamental group of certain geometric transformation groups is infinite. Examples include both finite and infinite dimensional Lie groups. The finite dimensional examples are the…

We define a cocycle on the group of symplectic diffeomorphisms of a symplectic manifold and investigate its properties. The main applications are concerned with symplectic actions of discrete groups. For example, we give an alternative…

Homogeneous compatible almost complex structures on symplectic manifolds are studied, focusing on those which are special, meaning that their Chern-Ricci form is a multiple of the symplectic form. Non Chern-Ricci flat ones are proven to be…

We show that there is an hierarchy of intersection rigidity properties of sets in a closed symplectic manifold: some sets cannot be displaced by symplectomorphisms from more sets than the others. We also find new examples of rigidity of…

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…

We classify up to conjugacy the group generated by a commuting pair of a periodic diffeomorphism and a hyperelliptic involution on an oriented closed surface. This result can be viewed as a refinement of Ishizaka's result on classification…

Friedman and Morgan made the "speculation" that deformation equivalence and diffeomorphism should coincide for algebraic surfaces. Counterexamples, for the hitherto open case of surfaces of general type, have been given in the last years by…

Let $(S,\omega)$ be a closed connected oriented surface whose genus $l$ is at least two equipped with a symplectic form. Then we show the vanishing of the cup product of the fluxes of commuting symplectomorphisms. This result may be…

We show that a group of diffeomorphisms $\D$ on the open unit interval $I,$ equipped with the topology of uniform convergence on any compact set of the derivatives at any order, is non regular: the exponential map is not defined for some…

We use symplectic tools to establish a smooth variant of Franks theorem for a closed orientable surface of positive genus $g$; it implies that a symplectic diffeomorphism isotopic to the identity with more than $2g-2$ fixed points, counted…

We determine which connected surfaces can be partitioned into topological circles. There are exactly seven such surfaces up to homeomorphism: those of finite type, of Euler characteristic zero, and with compact boundary components. As a…

In this paper we show that even in the case of simply connected minimal algebraic surfaces of general type, deformation and differentiable equivalence do not coincide. Exhibiting several simple families of surfaces which are not deformation…

We study the homeomorphism types of certain covers of (always orientable) surfaces, usually of infinite-type. We show that every surface with non-abelian fundamental group is covered by every noncompact surface, we identify the universal…

As was recently pointed out by McMullen and Taubes [Math. Res. Lett. 6 (1999) 681-696], there are 4-manifolds for which the diffeomorphism group does not act transitively on the deformation classes of orientation-compatible symplectic…

We construct diffeomorphisms of ``pseudo-Anosov type'' on K3 surfaces M. In particular we obtain infinitely many examples of such diffeomorphisms that minimize entropy in their homotopy class, and for which neither the diffeomorphism nor…

We construct embeddings of surface groups into the group of germs of analytic diffeomorphisms in one variable.