Related papers: Stein-fillability and positivity in the mapping cl…

We study several geometric and group theoretical problems related to Kodaira fibrations, to more general families of Riemann surfaces, and to surface-by-surface groups. First we provide constraints on Kodaira fibrations that fiber in more…

In this article, using combinatorial techniques of mapping class groups, we show that a Stein fillable integral homology $3$-sphere supported by an open book decomposition with page a $4$-holed sphere admits a unique Stein filling up to…

We prove that any weakly symplectically fillable contact manifold is tight. Furthermore we verify the strong Weinstein conjecture for contact manifolds that appear as the concave boundary of a directed symplectic cobordism whose positive…

In this note we observe that while all overtwisted contact structures on compact 3--manifolds are supported by planar open book decompositions, not all contact structures are. This has relevance to invariants of contact structures and also…

We give a bordism-theoretic characterisation of those closed almost contact (2q+1)-manifolds (with q > 2) which admit a Stein fillable contact structure. Our method is to apply Eliashberg's h-principle for Stein manifolds in the setting of…

We show that there are vast families of contact 3-manifolds each member of which admits infinitely many Stein fillings with arbitrarily big euler characteristics and arbitrarily small signatures ---which disproves a conjecture of Stipsicz…

This paper investigates the relationship between strata of abelian differentials and various mapping class groups afforded by means of the topological monodromy representation. Building off of prior work of the authors, we show that the…

We compute the mapping class group-valued monodromy of any sufficiently ample linear system on any smooth simply connected projective surface, identifying this with the r-spin mapping class group associated to a maximal root of the adjoint…

We determine parts of the contact homology of certain contact 3-manifolds in the framework of open book decompositions, due to Giroux. We study two cases: when the monodromy map of the compatible open book is periodic and when it is…

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…

We present an alternate description of the Ozsvath-Szabo contact class in Heegaard Floer homology. Using our contact class, we prove that if a contact structure (M,\xi) has an adapted open book decomposition whose page S is a once-punctured…

We show that if the group of holomorphic automorphisms of a connected Stein manifold $M$ is isomorphic to that of ${\bf C}^n$ as a topological group equipped with the compact-open topology, then $M$ is biholomorphically equivalent to ${\bf…

A linear system on a smooth complex algebraic surface gives rise to a family of smooth curves in the surface. Such a family has a topological monodromy representation valued in the mapping class group of a fiber. Extending arguments of…

We give completely combinatorial proofs of the main results of [3] using polygons. Namely, we prove that the mapping class group of a surface with boundary acts faithfully on a finitely-generated linear category. Along the way we prove some…

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 study the large-scale geometry of mapping class groups of surfaces of infinite type, using the framework of Rosendal for coarse geometry of non locally compact groups. We give a complete classification of those surfaces whose mapping…

Let $X$ be a generic curve of genus $g$ defined over an algebraically closed field $k$ of characteristic $p\geq 0$. We show that for $n$ sufficiently large there exists a tame rational map $f:X\to \PP^1_k$ with monodromy group $A_n$. This…

For a punctured surface $S$, we characterize the representations of its fundamental group into $\mathrm{PSL}_2 (\mathbb{C})$ that arise as the monodromy of a meromorphic projective structure on $S$ with poles of order at most two and no…

In this article, we find the complete list of all contact structures (up to isotopy) on closed three-manifolds which are supported by an open book decomposition having planar pages with three (but not less) boundary components. We…

We show that the closure of the compactly supported mapping class group of an infinite type surface is not perfect and that its abelianization contains a direct summand isomorphic to an uncountable direct sum of rationals. We also extend…