Related papers: Special eccentricities of rational four-dimensiona…
The main goal of this paper is to give constructive proofs of several existence results for symplectic embeddings. The strong relation between symplectic packings and singular symplectic curves, which can be derived from McDuff's inflations…
The rational homology balls $B_n$ appeared in Fintushel and Stern's rational blow-down construction [FS2]. Later, Symington [Sy1], defined this operation in the symplectic category. In [Kh2], the author defined the inverse procedure, the…
We prove packing stability for any closed symplectic manifold with rational cohomology class. This will rely on a general symplectic embedding result for ellipsoids which assumes only that there is no volume obstruction and that the domain…
Here is a square problem: in a unit square, is there a point with four rational distances to the vertices? A probability argument suggests a negative answer. This paper proves several special cases of the square problem: if the point sits…
ECH (embedded contact homology) capacities give obstructions to symplectically embedding one four-dimensional symplectic manifold with boundary into another. These obstructions are known to be sharp when the domain and target are ellipsoids…
We investigate spaces of symplectic embeddings of $n\leq 4$ balls into the complex projective plane. We prove that they are homotopy equivalent to explicitly described algebraic subspaces of the configuration spaces of $n$ points. We…
Given a closed symplectic manifold, we construct invariants which count (a) closed rational pseudoholomorphic curves with prescribed cusp singularities and (b) punctured rational pseudoholomorphic curves with ellipsoidal negative ends. We…
We prove that the rational blowdown, a surgery on smooth 4-manifolds introduced by Fintushel and Stern, can be performed in the symplectic category. As a consequence, interesting families of smooth 4-manifolds, including the exotic $K3$…
A submanifold of the standard symplectic space determines a partially defined, multi-valued symplectic map, the outer symplectic billiard correspondence. Two points are in this correspondence if the midpoint of the segment connecting them…
Given two four-dimensional symplectic manifolds, together with knots in their boundaries, we define an ``anchored symplectic embedding'' to be a symplectic embedding, together with a two-dimensional symplectic cobordism between the knots…
Let $X$ be any rational ruled symplectic four-manifold. Given a symplectic embedding $\iota:B_{c}\into X$ of the standard ball of capacity $c$ into $X$, consider the corresponding symplectic blow-up $\tX_{\iota}$. In this paper, we study…
We offer some theorems, mainly of finiteness, for certain patterns in elliptical billiards, related to periodic trajectories. For instance, if two players hit a ball at a given position and with directions forming a fixed angle in…
We study the a.s. convergence of a sequence of random embeddings of a fixed manifold into Euclidean spaces of increasing dimensions. We show that the limit is deterministic. As a consequence, we show that many intrinsic functionals of the…
We evaluate the mean square limit of exponential sums related with a rational ellipsoid, extending a work of Marklof. Moreover, as a result of it, we study the asymptotic values of the normalized deviations of the number of lattice points…
We consider the embedding function $c_b(a)$ describing the problem of symplectically embedding an ellipsoid $E(1,a)$ into the smallest possible scaling by $\lambda>1$ of the polydisc $P(1,b)$. In particular, we calculate rigid-flexible…
We study smooth, proper embeddings of noncompact surfaces in 4-manifolds, focusing on exotic planes and annuli, i.e., embeddings pairwise homeomorphic to the standard embeddings of R^2 and R^2-int D^2 in R^4. We encounter two uncountable…
We study in this paper the rational homotopy type of the space of symplectic embeddings of the standard ball $B^4(c) \subset \R^4$ into 4-dimensional rational symplectic manifolds. We compute the rational homotopy groups of that space when…
The classical Birkhoff conjecture claims that the boundary of a strictly convex integrable billiard table is necessarily an ellipse (or a circle as a special case). In this article we prove a complete local version of this conjecture: a…
We exhibit an infinite family of rational homology balls which embed smoothly but not symplectically in the complex projective plane. We also obtain a new lattice embedding obstruction from Donaldson's diagonalisation theorem, and use this…
Embedded contact homology gives a sequence of obstructions to four-dimensional symplectic embeddings, called ECH capacities. In "Symplectic embeddings into four-dimensional concave toric domains", the author, Choi, Frenkel, Hutchings and…