Related papers: Explicit concave fillings of contact three-manifol…
In this note we make several observations concerning symplectic cobordisms. Among other things we show that every contact 3-manifold has infinitely many concave symplectic fillings and that all overtwisted contact 3-manifolds are…
In this survey article we describe different ways of embedding fillings of contact 3-manifolds into closed symplectic 4-manifolds.
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 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…
As shown by Etnyre and Honda in [EH], every contact 3-manifold admits infinitely many concave symplectic fillings that are mutually not symplectomorphic and not related by blow ups. In this note we refine this result in the toric setting by…
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…
In this paper, we investigate the minimal symplectic fillings of small Seifert 3-manifolds with a canonical contact structure. As a result, we classify all minimal symplectic fillings of small Seifert 3-manifolds satisfying certain…
We establish the method of holomorphic handle attaching to the strongly pseudoconcave boundary of a complex surface. We use this for proving the following statements: (1) every closed connected oriented contact 3-manifold can be filled as…
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…
These notes are based on a course that took place at the Universit\'e de Nantes in June 2011 during the "Trimester on Contact and Symplectic Topology". We will explain how holomorphic curves can be used to study symplectic fillings of a…
We exhibit tight contact structures on 3-manifolds that do not admit any symplectic fillings.
A standard convexity condition on the boundary of a symplectic manifold involves an induced positive contact form (and contact structure) on the boundary; the corresponding concavity condition involves an induced negative contact form. We…
We apply Menke's JSJ decomposition for symplectic fillings to several families of contact 3-manifolds. Among other results, we complete the classification up to orientation-preserving diffeomorphism of strong symplectic fillings of lens…
In this paper, we study confoliations in dimensions higher than three mostly from the perspective of symplectic fillability. Our main result is that Massot-Niederkr\"uger-Wendl's bordered Legendrian open book, an object that obstructs 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…
A spinal open book decomposition on a contact manifold is a generalization of a supporting open book which exists naturally e.g. on the boundary of a symplectic filling with a Lefschetz fibration over any compact oriented surface with…
We review Giroux's contact handles and contact handle attachments in dimension three and show that a bypass attachment consists of a pair of contact 1 and 2-handles. As an application we describe explicit contact handle decompositions of…
In this paper, we determine the Euler characteristics and signatures of the exact symplectic fillings of the contact double, 3-fold or 4-fold cyclic covers of the standard contact 3-sphere branched over certain transverse quasi-positive…
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…
We introduce symplectic Calabi-Yau caps to obtain new obstructions to exact fillings. In particular, it implies that any exact filling of the standard unit cotangent bundle of a hyperbolic surface has vanishing first Chern class and has the…