Related papers: Lefschetz fibrations, complex structures and Seife…
In this paper we classify symplectic Lefschetz fibrations (with empty base locus) on a four-manifold which is the product of a three-manifold with a circle. This result provides further evidence in support of the following conjecture…
We study constructions of contact forms on closed manifolds. A notion of strong symplectic fold structure is defined and we prove that there is a contact form on $M \x X$ provided that $M$ admits such a structure and $X$ is contact. This…
Let M be a closed, connected, orientable 3-manifold. The purpose of this paper is to study the Seiberg-Witten Floer homology of M given that S^1 X M admits a symplectic form. In particular, we prove that M fibers over the circle if M has…
Let M be a closed oriented 3-manifold such that S^1 x M admits a symplectic structure w. The goal of this paper is to show that M is a fiber bundle over S^1. The basic idea is to use the obvious S^1-action on S^1 x M by rotating the first…
We analyze four-dimensional symplectic manifolds of type $X=S^1 \times M^3$ where $M^3$ is an open $3$-manifold admitting inequivalent fibrations leading to inequivalent symplectic structures on $X$. For the case where $M^3 \subset S^3$ is…
We consider structures analogous to symplectic Lefschetz pencils in the context of a closed 4-manifold equipped with a `near-symplectic' structure (ie, a closed 2-form which is symplectic outside a union of circles where it vanishes…
We construct noncomplex smooth 4-manifolds which admit genus-2 Lefschetz fibrations over S^2. The fibrations are necessarily hyperelliptic, and the resulting 4-manifolds are not even homotopy equivalent to complex surfaces. Furthermore,…
We show that the total space of the Milnor fibration associated with any cusp or simple elliptic singularity in complex three variables admits an $S^1$-parametric genus-one Lefschetz fibration structure over the $2$-disk. As a consequence,…
In this article we study proper symplectic and iso-symplectic embeddings of $4$--manifolds in $6$--manifolds. We show that a closed orientable smooth $4$--manifold admitting a Lefschetz fibration over $\C P^1$ admits a symplectic embedding…
In this paper we give an explicit construction of a symplectic Lefschetz fibration whose total space is a smooth compact four dimensional manifold with a prescribed fundamental group. We also study the numerical properties of the sections…
We show that any 4-manifold, after surgery on a curve, admits an achiral Lefschetz fibration. In particular, we show that the connected sum of any simply connected 4-manifold with a 2-sphere bundle over the 2-sphere will admit an achiral…
Motivated by the programmes initiated by Taubes and Perutz, we study the geometry of near-symplectic 4-manifolds, i.e., manifolds equipped with a closed 2-form which is symplectic outside a union of embedded 1-dimensional submanifolds, and…
The topology of broken Lefschetz fibrations is studied by means of handle decompositions. We consider a slight generalization of round handles, and describe the handle diagrams for all that appear in dimension four. We establish simplified…
We prove that every closed oriented smooth 4-manifold X admits a broken Lefschetz fibration (aka singular Lefschetz fibration) over the 2-sphere. Given any closed orientable surface F of square zero in X, we can choose the fibration so that…
We construct open symplectic manifolds which are convex at infinity ("Liouville manifolds") and which are diffeomorphic, but not symplectically isomorphic, to cotangent bundles T^*S^{n+1}, for any n+1 \geq 3. These manifolds are constructed…
Given a manifold M, it is natural to ask in how many ways it fibers (we mean fibering in a general way, where the base might be an orbifold -- this could be described as Seifert fibering)There are group-theoretic obstructions to the…
We provide a closed, simply connected, symplectic $6$-manifold having infinitely many codimension $2$ symplectic submanifolds. These are mutually homologous but homotopy inequivalent, and furthermore, they cannot admit complex structures.…
We describe Lefschetz-Bott fibrations on complex line bundles over symplectic manifolds explicitly. As an application, we construct more than one strong symplectic filling of the link of the $A_{k}$-type singularity. In the appendix, we…
We show that a four-manifold admits a boundary Lefschetz fibration over the disc if and only if it is diffeomorphic to $S^1 \times S^3\# n \overline{\mathbb{C} P^2}$, $\# m\mathbb{C} P^2 \#n\overline{\mathbb{C} P^2}$ or $\# m (S^2 \times…
A real 3- or 4-manifold has by definition an orientation preserving smooth involution acting on it. We consider Lefschetz fibrations of 4-dimensional manifolds-with-boundary and open book decompositions on their boundary in the existence of…