Research

The Bourgeois construction associates to every contact open book on a manifold V a contact structure on V×T². We study in this article some of the properties of V that are inherited by V×T² and some that are not.

Giroux has provided recently a suitable framework to work with contact open books. In the appendix of this article, we quickly review this formalism, and we work out a few classical examples of contact open books to illustrate how to use this language.

We give examples of contactomorphisms in every dimension that are smoothly isotopic to the identity but that are not contact isotopic to the identity. In fact, we prove the stronger statement that they are not even symplectically pseudo-isotopic to the identity. We also give examples of pairs of contactomorphisms which are smoothly conjugate to each other but not by contactomorphisms.

By a result of Eliashberg, every symplectic filling of a three-dimensional contact connected sum is obtained by performing a boundary connected sum on another symplectic filling. We prove a partial generalization of this result for subcritical contact surgeries in higher dimensions: given any contact manifold that arises from another contact manifold by subcritical surgery, its belt sphere is zero in the oriented bordism group Ω^SO_∗(W) of any symplectically aspherical filling W, and in dimension five, it will even be nullhomotopic. More generally, if the filling is not aspherical but is semipositive, then the belt sphere will be trivial in H_∗(W). Using the same methods, we show that the contact connected sum decomposition for tight contact structures in dimension three does not extend to higher dimensions: in particular, we exhibit connected sums of manifolds of dimension at least five with Stein fillable contact structures that do not arise as contact connected sums. The proofs are based on holomorphic disk-filling techniques, with families of Legendrian open books (so-called "Lobs") as boundary conditions.

We show that the presence of a plastikstufe induces a certain degree of flexibility in contact manifolds of dimension 2n+1>3. More precisely, we prove that every Legendrian knot whose complement contains a "nice" plastikstufe can be destabilized (and, as a consequence, is loose). As an application, it follows in certain situations that two non-isomorphic contact structures become isomorphic after connect-summing with a manifold containing a plastikstufe.

For contact manifolds in dimension three, the notions of weak and strong symplectic fillability and tightness are all known to be inequivalent. We extend these facts to higher dimensions: in particular, we define a natural generalization of weak fillings and prove that it is indeed weaker (at least in dimension five),while also being obstructed by all known manifestations of "overtwistedness". We also find the first examples of contact manifolds in all dimensions that are not symplectically fillable but also cannot be called overtwisted in any reasonable sense. These depend on a higher-dimensional analogue of Giroux torsion, which we define via the existence in all dimensions of exact symplectic manifolds with disconnected contact boundary.

We prove several results on weak symplectic fillings of contact 3-manifolds, including: (1) Every weak filling of any planar contact manifold can be deformed to a blow up of a Stein filling. (2) Contact manifolds that have planar torsion with an extra homological condition are not weakly fillable -this gives many new examples of contact manifolds without Giroux torsion that have no weak fillings. (3) Weak fillability is preserved under splicing of contact manifolds along symplectic pre-Lagrangian tori - this gives many new examples of contact manifolds without Giroux torsion that are weakly but not strongly fillable.

We establish the obstructions to weak fillings via two parallel approaches using holomorphic curves. In the first approach, we generalize the original Gromov-Eliashberg "Bishop disk" argument to study the special case of Giroux torsion via a Bishop family of holomorphic annuli with boundary on an "anchored overtwisted annulus". The second approach uses punctured holomorphic curves, and is based on the observation that every weak filling can be deformed in a collar neighborhood so as to induce a stable Hamiltonian structure on the boundary. This also makes it possible to apply the techniques of Symplectic Field Theory, which we demonstrate in a test case by showing that the distinction between weakly and strongly fillable translates into contact homology as the distinction between twisted and untwisted coefficients.

Helmut Hofer introduced in '93 a novel technique based on holomorphic curves to prove the Weinstein conjecture. Among the cases where these methods apply are all contact 3-manifolds (M,ξ) with π₂(M) ≠ 0. We modify Hofer's argument to prove the Weinstein conjecture for some examples of higher dimensional contact manifolds. In particular, we are able to show that the connected sum with a real projective space always has a closed contractible Reeb orbit.

The well-known tubular neighborhood theorem for contact submanifolds states that a small enough neighborhood of such a submanifold N is uniquely determined by the contact structure on N, and the conformal symplectic structure of the normal bundle. In particular, if the submanifold N has trivial normal bundle then its tubular neighborhood will be contactomorphic to a neighborhood of N×{0} in the model space N×R^2k.

In this article we make the observation that if (N,ξ_N) is a 3-dimensional overtwisted submanifold with trivial normal bundle in (M,ξ), and if its model neighborhood is sufficiently large, then (M,ξ) does not admit a symplectically aspherical filling.

Click here to watch a talk about this article given at MSRI.

Symplectic field theory (SFT) is a collection of homology theories that provide invariants for contact manifolds. We give a proof that vanishing of any one of either contact homology, rational SFT or (full) SFT are equivalent. We call a manifold for which these theories vanish "algebraically overtwisted".

Symplectic reduction is a technique that can be used to decrease the dimension of Hamiltonian manifolds. Unfortunately, this only works under strong assumptions on the group action, and in general, even for a compact Lie group, the reduction at a coadjoint orbit that is transverse to the moment map will only yield a symplectic orbifold.

In this article, we show how to construct resolutions of symplectic orbifolds obtained as quotients of presymplectic manifolds with a torus action. As a corollary, this allows us to desingularize generic symplectic quotients for compact Lie group actions. More precisely, if a point in the Lie coalgebra is regular, that is, its stabilizer is a maximal torus, then we may apply our desingularization result. Regular elements of the Lie coalgebra are generic in the sense that the singular strata have codimension at least three.

Additionally, we show that even though the result of a symplectic cut is an orbifold, it can be modified in an arbitrarily small neighborhood of the cut hypersurface to obtain a smooth symplectic manifold.

In this paper we present a method to obtain resolutions of symplectic orbifolds arising as quotients of pre-symplectic semi-free S¹-actions. This includes, in particular, all orbifolds arising from symplectic reduction of Hamiltonian S¹-manifolds at regular values, as well as all isolated cyclic orbifold singularities.

As an application, we show that pre-quantisations of symplectic orbifolds are symplectically fillable by a smooth manifold.

DISCLAIMER: Contrary to what is claimed in "Symplectic resolutions, Lefschetz property and formality" by G. Cavalcanti, M. Fernández, and V. Muñoz, their result does not render our construction useless. The main innovation in their resolution method consists in only studying orbifolds with isolated singularities and ignoring more difficult singularities.

We show that Brieskorn manifolds with their standard contact structures are contact branched coverings of spheres. This covering maps a contact open book decomposition of the Brieskorn manifold onto a Milnor open book of the sphere.

Recently Francisco Presas Mata constructed the first examples of closed contact manifolds of dimension larger than 3 that contain a plastikstufe, and hence are non-fillable. Using contact surgery on his examples we create on every sphere S^2n-1, n>1, an exotic contact structure ξ_- that allows us to embed a plastikstufe. As a consequence, every closed contact manifold M (with exception of S¹) can be converted by taking the connected sum of (M,ξ)# (S^2n-1,ξ_-) into a contact manifold that is not (semi-positively) fillable.

In this article, we give a first prototype-definition of overtwistedness in higher dimensions. According to this definition, a contact manifold is called overtwisted if it contains a plastikstufe, a submanifold foliated by the contact structure in a certain way. In three dimensions the definition of the plastikstufe is identical to the one of the overtwisted disk. The main justification for this definition lies in the fact that the existence of a plastikstufe implies that the contact manifold does not have a (semipositive) symplectic filling.

In the first part of this paper the five-dimensional contact SO(3)-manifolds are classified up to equivariant coorientation preserving contactomorphisms. The construction of such manifolds with singular orbits requires the use of generalized Dehn twists. We show as an application that all simply connected 5-manifolds with singular orbits are realized by a Brieskorn manifold with exponents (k,2,2,2). The standard contact structure on such a manifold gives right-handed Dehn twists, and a second contact structure defined in the article gives left-handed twists. In an appendix we also describe the classification of five-dimensional contact SU(2)-manifolds.

In this paper, we give an open book decomposition for the contact structures on some Brieskorn manifolds, in particular for the contact structures of Ustilovsky. The decomposition uses right-handed Dehn twists as conjectured by Giroux.