Related papers: Topological Obstructions to Dynamical Convexity

This survey presents some recent results by the authors and Polterovich on the topological properties of ruled symplectic manifolds. The bundle M \to P \to B that is associated with a ruled manifold has the group of Hamiltonian…

We construct a simple topological invariant of certain 3-manifolds, including quotients of the 3-sphere by finite groups, based on the fact that the tangent bundle of an orientable 3-manifold is trivialisable. This invariant is strong…

We show that complex symplectic structures need not be preserved under small deformations, and we find sufficient conditions for this to happen. We study various cohomologies of compact complex symplectic manifolds, obtaining some…

An important class of contact 3--manifolds are those that arise as links of rational surface singularities with reduced fundamental cycle. We explicitly describe symplectic caps (concave fillings) of such contact 3--manifolds. As an…

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…

This sequel to our previous paper [MS11b] continues the study of topological contact dynamics and applications to contact dynamics and topological dynamics. We provide further evidence that the topological automorphism groups of a contact…

Cohesive assemblies of filaments are a common structural motif found in diverse contexts, ranging from biological materials such as fibrous proteins, to artificial materials such as carbon nanotube ropes and micropatterned filament arrays.…

This paper gives a uniform, self-contained and direct approach to a variety of obstruction-theoretic problems on manifolds of dimension 7 and 6. We give necessary and sufficient cohomological criteria for the existence of various…

While intersections of convex sets are convex, their unions have rather complicated behavior. Some natural contexts where they appear include duality arguments involving boundaries of convex sets and valuations, which have an Euler…

We study smooth maps between smooth manifolds with only fold points as their singularities, and clarify the obstructions to the existence of such a map in a given homotopy class for certain dimensions. The obstructions are described in…

We define symplectic fractional twists, which generalize Dehn twists, and use these in open books to investigate contact structures. The resulting contact structures are invariant under a circle action, and share several similarities with…

Topological defects are crucial to the thermodynamics and structure of condensed matter systems. For instance, when incorporated into crystalline membranes like graphene, disclinations with positive and negative topological charge…

We study smooth fibrations of compact torsion-free Spin(7)-manifolds by Cayley submanifolds. Using geometric and topological constraints coming from the Spin(7)-structure, we show that only two topological configurations can arise. One of…

In this paper, we study strong symplectic fillability and Stein fillability of some tight contact structures on negative parabolic and negative hyperbolic torus bundles over the circle. For the universally tight contact structure with…

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…

We prove that symplectic cohomology for open convex symplectic manifolds is invariant when the symplectic form undergoes deformations which may be non-exact and non-compactly supported, provided one uses the correct local system of…

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…

Codimension 2 contact submanifolds are the natural generalization of transverse knots to contact manifolds of arbitrary dimension. In this paper, we construct new invariants of codimension 2 contact submanifolds. Our main invariant can be…

We prove that closed connected contact manifolds of dimension $\geq 5$ related by an h-cobordism with a flexible Weinstein structure become contactomorphic after some kind of stabilization. We also provide examples of non-conjugate contact…

The Borel Conjecture predicts that closed aspherical manifolds are topological rigid. We want to investigate when a non-aspherical oriented connected closed manifold M is topological rigid in the following sense. If f: N --> M is an…