Related papers: Sesquicuspidal curves, scattering diagrams, and sy…

We show that the infinite staircases which arise in the ellipsoid embedding functions of rigid del Pezzo surfaces (with their monotone symplectic forms) can be entirely explained in terms of rational sesquicuspidal symplectic curves.…

McDuff and Schlenk determined when a four-dimensional ellipsoid can be symplectically embedded into a four-dimensional ball, and found that when the ellipsoid is close to round, the answer is given by an "infinite staircase" determined by…

We define a suitably tame class of singular symplectic curves in 4-manifolds, namely those whose singularities are modeled on complex curve singularities. We study the corresponding symplectic isotopy problem, with a focus on rational…

As has been known since the time of Gromov's Nonsqueezing Theorem, symplectic embedding questions lie at the heart of symplectic geometry. After surveying some of the most important ways of measuring the size of a symplectic set, these…

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…

A striking result of McDuff and Schlenk asserts that in determining when a four-dimensional symplectic ellipsoid can be symplectically embedded into a four-dimensional symplectic ball, the answer is governed by an "infinite staircase"…

An influential result of McDuff and Schlenk asserts that the function that encodes when a four-dimensional symplectic ellipsoid can be embedded into a four-dimensional ball has a remarkable structure: the function has infinitely many…

These notes are based on a five-part minicourse on stabilized symplectic embeddings given in Les Mar\'ecottes, Switzerland during a September 2025 workshop. Our main goal is to explain the recent resolution of the (restricted) stabilized…

Let E(1)_p denote the rational elliptic surface with a single multiple fiber f_p of multiplicity p. We construct an infinite family of homologous non-isotopic symplectic tori representing the primitive class [f_p] in E(1)_p when p>1. As a…

The ellipsoid embedding function of a symplectic manifold gives the smallest amount by which the symplectic form must be scaled in order for a standard ellipsoid of the given eccentricity to embed symplectically into the manifold. It was…

We classify rational cuspidal curves of degrees 6 and 7 in the complex projective plane, up to symplectic isotopy. The proof uses topological tools, pseudoholomorphic techniques, and birational transformations.

We show how to reduce the problem of symplectically embedding one 4-dimensional rational ellipsoid into another to a problem of embedding disjoint unions of balls into appropriate blow ups of \C P^2. For example, the problem of embedding…

The symplectic isotopy conjecture states that every smooth symplectic surface in $CP^2$ is symplectically isotopic to a complex algebraic curve. Progress began with Gromov's pseudoholomorphic curves [Gro85], and progressed further…

In this paper we prove the connectedness of symplectic ball packings in the complement of a spherical Lagrangian, S^2 or RP^2, in symplectic manifolds that are rational or ruled. Via a symplectic cutting construction this is a natural…

The main purpose of this paper is to summarize the basic ingredients, illustrated with examples, of a pseudoholomorphic curve theory for symplectic 4-orbifolds. These are extensions of relevant work of Gromov, McDuff and Taubes on…

A symplectic rational cuspidal curve with positive self-intersection number admits a concave neighborhood, and thus a corresponding contact manifold on the boundary. In this article, we study symplectic fillings of such contact manifolds,…

We give an overview of various recent results concerning the topology of symplectic 4-manifolds and singular plane curves, using branched covers and isotopy problems as a unifying theme. While this paper does not contain any new results, we…

This article introduces a new method to construct volume-filling symplectic embeddings of 4-dimensional ellipsoids by employing polytope mutations in toric and almost-toric varieties. The construction uniformly recovers the full sequences…

We prove in this paper that any 4-dimensional symplectic manifold is essentially made of finitely many symplectic ellipsoids. The key tool is a singular analogue of Donaldson's symplectic hypersurfaces in irrational symplectic manifolds.

McDuff and Schlenk have recently determined exactly when a four-dimensional symplectic ellipsoid symplectically embeds into a symplectic ball. Similarly, Frenkel and M\"uller have recently determined exactly when a symplectic ellipsoid…