English

Compact Stein surfaces as branched covers with same branch sets

Geometric Topology 2018-04-11 v2 Symplectic Geometry

Abstract

Loi and Piergallini showed that a smooth compact, connected 44-manifold XX with boundary admits a Stein structure if and only if XX is a simple branched cover of a 44-disk D4D^4 branched along a positive braided surface SS in a bidisk D12×D22D4D_{1}^{2} \times D_{2}^{2} \approx D^4. For each integer N2N \geq 2, we construct a braided surface SNS_{N} in D4D^4 and simple branched covers XN,1,XN,2,,XN,NX_{N, 1}, X_{N, 2}, \dots , X_{N, N} of D4D^{4} branched along SNS_{N} such that the covers have the same degrees, and they are mutually diffeomorphic, but the Stein structures associated to the covers are mutually not homotopic. Furthermore, by reinterpreting this result in terms of contact topology, for each integer N2N \geq 2, we also construct a transverse link LNL_{N} in the standard contact 33-sphere (S3,ξstd)(S^3, \xi_{std}) and simple branched covers MN,1,MN,2,,MN,NM_{N,1}, M_{N,2}, \ldots, M_{N, N} of S3S^3 branched along LNL_{N} such that the covers have the same degrees, and they are mutually diffeomorphic, but the contact structures associated to the covers are mutually not isotopic.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1508.01020,
  title  = {Compact Stein surfaces as branched covers with same branch sets},
  author = {Takahiro Oba},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.01020},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

18 pages, 11 figures; largely modified, in particular, the proof of Theorem 1.1 simplified

R2 v1 2026-06-22T10:26:51.629Z