Related papers: Handlebody Construction of Stein Surfaces

A correspondence, by way of Heegaard splittings, between closed oriented 3-manifolds and pairs of surjections from a surface group to a free group has been studied by Stallings, Jaco, and Hempel. This correspondence, by way of trisections,…

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…

In this second paper of a two-part series, we prove that whenever a contact 3-manifold admits a uniform spinal open book decomposition with planar pages, its (weak, strong and/or exact) symplectic and Stein fillings can be classified up to…

We show that there exists an infinite family of pairwise non-isotopic Legendrian knots in the standard contact 3-sphere whose Stein traces are equivalent. This is the first example of such phenomenon. Different constructions are developed…

We describe explicit horizontal open books on some Seifert fibered 3--manifolds. We show that the contact structures compatible with these horizontal open books are Stein fillable and horizontal as well. Moreover we draw surgery diagrams…

The main theorem of this paper generalizes recent results in Dehn surgery to the case of handlebody attachment. We consider attaching handlebodies and solid tori to the boundary of an irreducible, boundary-irreducible, atoroidal and…

In this paper, we survey recent works on the structure of the mapping class groups of surfaces mainly from the point of view of topology. We then discuss several possible directions for future research. These include the relation between…

This paper presents, with explanatory details, the handle decompositions, fundamental groups and homology groups of 3-manifolds, including some knot complements. Hence, along this paper, when the word manifold appears it is implicit that…

We construct examples of fibered three-manifolds with first Betti number at least 2 and with fibered faces all of whose monodromies extend to a handlebody.

The aim of this article is to introduce and study certain topological invariants for closed, oriented three-manifolds Y. These groups are relatively Z-graded Abelian groups associated to SpinC structures over Y. Given a genus g Heegaard…

We show that every open book decomposition of a contact 3-manifold can be represented (up to isotopy) by a smooth R-invariant family of pseudoholomorphic curves on its symplectization with respect to a suitable stable Hamiltonian structure.…

This paper gives a proof that the universal cover of a closed 3-manifold built from three $\pi_1$-injective handlebodies is homeomorphic to $\mathbb R^3$. This construction is an extension to handlebodies of the conditions for gluing of…

We give a bordism-theoretic characterisation of those closed almost contact (2q+1)-manifolds (with q > 2) which admit a Stein fillable contact structure. Our method is to apply Eliashberg's h-principle for Stein manifolds in the setting of…

In this paper we obtain the following results: (1) Any compact Stein surface with boundary embeds naturally into a symplectic Lefschetz fibration over the 2-sphere. (2) There exists a minimal elliptic fibration over the 2-disk, which is not…

We prove that there are homology three-spheres that bound definite four-manifolds, but any such bounding four-manifold must be built out of many handles. The argument uses the homology cobordism invariant $\Gamma$ from instanton Floer…

This paper continues the study of decompositions of a smooth 4-manifold into two handlebodies with handles of index $\leq2$. Part I gave existence results in terms of spines and chain complexes over the fundamental group of the ambient…

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…

We give a method for obtaining a handle decomposition of an $n$-manifold if the manifold is given by isometric side-pairings of a polyhedron in $\en$, $\sn$ or $\hn$. Every cycle of $k$-faces on the polyhedron corresponds to an…

We show that any closed oriented 3-manifold can be topologically embedded in some simply-connected closed symplectic 4-manifold, and that it can be made a smooth embedding after one stabilization. As a corollary of the proof we show that…

We study closed orientable manifolds whose topological complexity is at most 3 and determine their cohomology rings. For some of admissible cohomology rings we are also able to identify corresponding manifolds up to homeomorphism.