Related papers: Open books and configurations of symplectic surfac…

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 show that every negative definite configuration of symplectic surfaces in a symplectic 4--manifold has a strongly symplectically convex neighborhood. We use this to show that, if a negative definite configuration satisfies an additional…

We show that under appropriate hypotheses, a plumbing of symplectic surfaces in a symplectic 4-manifold admits strongly convex neighborhoods. Moreover the neighborhoods are Lefschetz fibered with an easily-described open book on the…

We investigate the notion of symplectic divisorial compactification for symplectic 4-manifolds with either convex or concave type boundary. This is motivated by the notion of compactifying divisors for open algebraic surfaces. We give a…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Previously work of the author with Meier and Starkston showed that every closed symplectic manifold $(X,\omega)$ with a rational symplectic form admits a trisection compatible with the symplectic topology. In this paper, we describe the…

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…

In the breakthrough paper [V. Mu\~noz, A Smale-Barden manifold admitting K-contact but not Sasakian structure, 2024, 10.4171/JEMS/1496], it is constructed the first example of a simply connected compact 5-manifold (aka.\ Smale-Barden…

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,…

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 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 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 establish a criterion that ensures a bounded almost complex curve in a bounded almost complex 4-manifold minimizes genus amongst all smooth surfaces that share its homology class and the transverse link on its boundary. An immediate…

In this note we study the contact geometry of symplectic divisors. We show the contact structure induced on the boundary of a divisor neighborhood is invariant under toric and interior blow-ups and blow-downs. We also construct an open book…

This paper addresses several isotopy problems on $4$-manifolds. First, we classify the isotopy classes of embeddings of $\Sigma$ in $\Sigma\times S^2$ that are geometrically dual to $\{\mbox{pt}\}\times S^2$, where $\Sigma$ is a closed…