Related papers: Symplectic rational blow-down along Seifert fibere…

In this short note, we give an explicit construction of inequivalent Lefschetz pencils and fibrations of same genera on blow-ups of all rational and ruled surfaces. This complements our earlier results, concluding that every symplectic…

In this paper we introduce a surgical procedure, called a rational blowdown, for a smooth 4-manifold X and determine how this procedure affects both the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten invariants of X.

We prove that smooth quartic threefolds are symplectically irrational, i.e., cannot be related to projective space by a series of symplectic blow-ups, blow-downs, and deformations. This implies that they are algebraically irrational,…

We study holomorphic symplectic manifolds which are fibred by abelian varieties. This structure is a higher dimensional analogue of an elliptic fibration on a K3 surface. We investigate when a holomorphic symplectic manifold is fibred in…

We define a new 4-dimensional symplectic cut and paste operation which is analogous to Fintushel and Stern's rational blow-down. We use this operation to produce multiple constructions of symplectic smoothly exotic complex projective space…

The rational blowdown operation in 4-manifold topology replaces a neighborhood of a configuration of spheres by a rational homology ball. Such configurations typically arise from resolutions of surface singularities that admit rational…

We introduce new symplectic cut-and-paste operations that generalize the rational blowdown. In particular, we will define $k$-replaceable plumbings to be those that, heuristically, can be symplectically replaced by Euler characteristic $k$…

Harer, Kas and Kirby have conjectured that every handle decomposition of the elliptic surface $E(1)_{2,3}$ requires both 1- and 3-handles. In this article, we construct a smooth 4-manifold which has the same Seiberg-Witten invariant as…

We establish a blowing down criterion in the context of birational symplectic geometry in dimension 6.

In a previous work, we proved that each minimal symplectic filling of any oriented lens space, viewed as the singularity link of some cyclic quotient singularity and equipped with its canonical contact structure, can be obtained from the…

In this article we extend cutting and blowing up to the nonrational symplectic toric setting. This entails the possibility of cutting and blowing up for symplectic toric manifolds and orbifolds in nonrational directions.

We show that hyperelliptic symplectic Lefschetz fibrations are symplectically birational to two-fold covers of rational ruled surfaces, branched in a symplectically embedded surface. This reduces the classification of genus 2 fibrations to…

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…

There are two main results. The first states that isotropy subgroups of groups acting transitively on a rationally hyperbolic spaces have infinitely generated rational cohomology algebra. Using this fact, we prove that the analogous…

A study of symplectic actions of a finite group $G$ on smooth 4-manifolds is initiated. The central new idea is the use of $G$-equivariant Seiberg-Witten-Taubes theory in studying the structure of the fixed-point set of these symmetries.…

Recent work of Siegel and of Moreno and Zhou uses rational symplectic field theory to construct (different) invariants of contact manifolds. Here, I review how the algebraic parts of their work can be phrased in the algebraic language of…

A symplectic manifold is called symplectic rationally connected if there is a non-zero genus zero Gromov-Witten invariant with two point insertions. It is conjectured that every smooth projective rationally connected variety is symplectic…

We exhibit many examples of closed symplectic manifolds on which there is an autonomous Hamiltonian whose associated flow has no nonconstant periodic orbits (the only previous explicit example in the literature was the torus T^2n (n\geq 2)…

This is the third of a series of papers studying real algebraic threefolds, but the methods are mostly independent from the previous two. Let $f:X\to S$ be a map of a smooth projective real algebraic 3-fold to a surface $S$ whose general…

We show that a small Seifert fibered space with complementary legs does not symplectically bound a rational homology ball for at least one choice of orientation. In the case $e_0\leq -1$, we characterize when a small Seifert fibered space…