Related papers: Geography of symplectic Lefschetz fibrations and r…

We define a new 4-dimensional symplectic cut and paste operation which is analogous to Fintushel and Stern's rational blow-down. We use this operation to produce multiple constructions of symplectic smoothly exotic complex projective space…

We find a new relation among right-handed Dehn twists in the mapping class group of a $k$-holed torus for $4 \leq k \leq 9$. This relation induces an elliptic Lefschetz pencil structure on the four-manifold \cp $#(9-k)$ \cpb $ $ with $k$…

We examine how symplectic cohomology may be used as an invariant on symplectic structures, and investigate the non-uniqueness of these structures on Liouville domains, a field which has seen much development in the past decade. Notably, we…

In this article, we generalize the results discussed in [arXiv:1004.3762] by introducing a genus to generic fibers of Lefschetz fibrations. That is, we give families of relations in the mapping class groups of genus-1 surfaces with…

Let M be a smooth 4-manifold which admits a relatively minimal hyperelliptic genus h Lefschetz fibration over the 2-sphere. If all of the vanishing cycles for this fibration are nonseparating curves, then we show that M is a 2-fold cover of…

Using the existence of certain symplectic submanifolds in symplectic 4-manifolds, we prove an estimate from above for the number of singular fibers with separating vanishing cycles in minimal Lefschetz fibrations over surfaces of positive…

We show how to construct broken, achiral Lefschetz fibrations on arbitrary smooth, closed, oriented 4-manifolds. These are generalizations of Lefschetz fibrations over the 2-sphere, where we allow Lefschetz singularities with the…

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…

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 study the vanishing cycles on the Milnor fibre of a holomorphic map germ with special kind of non-isolated singularities which appear in symplectic geometry. We show, under assumptions given in the text, that the Lefschetz vanishing…

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.…

These are (heavily revised) notes from lectures given at the AMS Algebraic Geometry meeting in Seattle, 2005. The main topic is symplectic homology seen from the point of view of Lefschetz fibrations. Most of the content is speculative, but…

We prove that if a contact 3-manifold admits an open book decomposition of genus 0, a certain intersection pattern cannot appear in the homology of any of its minimal symplectic fillings, and moreover, fillings cannot contain symplectic…

We show that there is a complex structure on the symplectic 4-manifold $W_{4, k}$ obtained from the elliptic surface E(4) by rationally blowing down $k$ sections for $2\le k\le 9$. And we interpret it via ${\mathbb Q}$-Gorenstein smoothing.…

In this paper we compute the homotopy groups of the symplectomorphism groups of the 3-, 4- and 5-point blow-ups of the projective plane (considered as monotone symplectic Del Pezzo surfaces). Along the way, we need to compute the homotopy…

We prove that every minimal symplectic filling of the link of a quotient surface singularity can be obtained from its minimal resolution by applying a sequence of rational blow-downs and symplectic antiflips. We present an explicit…

We prove that if a symplectic 4-manifold $X$ becomes a rational 4-manifold after applying rational blow-down surgery, then the symplectic 4-manifold $X$ is originally rational. That is, a symplectic rational blow-up of a rational symplectic…

We give a new characterization of symplectic surfaces in CP^2 via bridge trisections. Specifically, a minimal genus surface in CP^2 is smoothly isotopic to a symplectic surface if and only if it is smoothly isotopic to a surface in…

We study Milnor fibers and symplectic fillings of links of sandwiched singularities, with the goal of contrasting their algebro-geometric deformation theory and symplectic topology. In the algebro-geometric setting, smoothings of sandwiched…

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…