Related papers: Fillability obstructions for high-dimensional conf…
For contact manifolds in dimension three, the notions of weak and strong symplectic fillability and tightness are all known to be inequivalent. We extend these facts to higher dimensions: in particular, we define a natural generalization of…
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…
We generalize the familiar notions of overtwistedness and Giroux torsion in 3-dimensional contact manifolds, defining an infinite hierarchy of local filling obstructions called planar torsion, whose integer-valued order $k \ge 0$ can be…
By a result of Eliashberg, every symplectic filling of a three-dimensional contact connected sum is obtained by performing a boundary connected sum on another symplectic filling. We prove a partial generalization of this result for…
Given a contact structure on a manifold $V$ together with a supporting open book decomposition, Bourgeois gave an explicit construction of a contact structure on $V \times \mathbb{T}^2$. We prove that all such structures are universally…
The first goal of this paper is to construct examples of higher dimensional contact manifolds with specific properties. Our main results in this direction are the existence of tight virtually overtwisted closed contact manifolds in all…
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…
In this note we make several observations concerning symplectic fillings. In particular we show that a (strongly or weakly) semi-fillable contact structure is fillable and any filling embeds as a symplectic domain in a closed symplectic…
According to Lerman, compact connected toric contact 3-manifolds with a non-free toric action whose moment cone spans an angle greater than $\pi$ are overtwisted, thus non-fillable. In contrast, we show that all compact connected toric…
We construct examples in any odd dimension of contact manifolds with finite and non-zero algebraic torsion (in the sense of Latschev-Wendl), which are therefore tight and do not admit strong symplectic fillings. We prove that Giroux torsion…
We obtain several results for (iterated) planar contact manifolds in higher dimensions: (1) Iterated planar contact manifolds are not weakly symplectically semi-fillable. This generalizes a 3-dimensional result of Etnyre to a…
We study neighborhoods of configurations of symplectic surfaces in symplectic 4-manifolds. We show that suitably `positive' configurations have neighborhoods with concave boundaries and we explicitly describe open book decompositions of the…
We introduce the Kodaira dimension of contact 3-manifolds and establish some basic properties. In particular, contact 3-manifolds with distinct Kodaria dimensions behave differently when it comes to the geography of various kinds of…
We construct four-dimensional symplectic cobordisms between contact three-manifolds generalizing an example of Eliashberg. One key feature is that any handlebody decomposition of one of these cobordisms must involve three-handles. The other…
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…
A geometric obstruction, the so called "plastikstufe", for a contact structure to not being fillable has been found by K. Niederkruger. This generalizes somehow the concept of overtwisted structure to dimensions higher than 3. This paper…
We show that the pre-order defined on the category of contact manifolds by arbitrary symplectic cobordisms is considerably less rigid than its counterparts for exact or Stein cobordisms: in particular, we exhibit large new classes of…
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…
This paper deals with the following question: which manifolds can be realized as leaves of codimension-1 symplectic foliations on closed manifolds? We first observe that leaves of symplectic foliations are necessarily strongly geometrically…
In this paper we give explicit, handle-by-handle constructions of concave symplectic fillings of all closed, oriented contact 3-manifolds. These constructions combine recent results of Giroux relating contact structures and open book…