We use exact Lagrangian fillings and Weinstein handlebody diagrams to construct infinitely many distinct exact Lagrangian tori in $4$-dimensional Milnor fibers of isolated hypersurface singularities with positive modality. We also provide a generalization of a criterion for when the symplectic homology of a Weinstein $4$-manifold is non-vanishing given an explicit Weinstein handlebody diagrams.
The Milnor fibre of any isolated hypersurface singularity contains many exact Lagrangian spheres: the vanishing cycles associated to a Morsification of the singularity. Moreover, for simple singularities, it is known that the only possible exact Lagrangians are spheres. We construct exact Lagrangian tori in the Milnor fibres of all non-simple singularities of real dimension four. This gives examples of Milnor fibres whose Fukaya categories are not generated by vanishing cycles. Also, this allows progress towards mirror symmetry for unimodal singularities, which are one level of complexity up f…
We determine a one-to-one correspondence between Milnor fibers and minimal symplectic fillings of a quotient surface singularity (up to diffeomorphism type) by giving an explicit algorithm to compare them mainly via techniques from the minimal model program for 3-folds and Pinkham's negative weight smoothing. As by-products, we show that: -- Milnor fibers associated to irreducible components of the reduced versal deformation space of a quotient surface singularity are not diffeomorphic to each other with a few obvious exceptions. For this, we classify minimal symplectic fillings of a quotient …
We generalize the mixed tori which appear in the second author's JSJ-type decomposition theorem for symplectic fillings of contact manifolds. Mixed tori are convex surfaces in contact manifolds which may be used to decompose symplectic fillings. We call our more general surfaces splitting surfaces, and show that the decomposition of symplectic fillings continues to hold. Specifically, given a strong or exact symplectic filling of a contact manifold which admits a splitting surface, we produce a new symplectic manifold which strongly or exactly fills its boundary, and which is related to the or…
We study the symplectic topology of some finite algebraic quotients of the An Milnor fibre which are diffeomorphic to the rational homology balls that appear in Fintushel and Stern's rational blowdown construction. We prove that these affine surfaces have no closed exact Lagrangian submanifolds by using the already available and deep understanding of the Fukaya category of the An Milnor fibre coming from homological mirror symmetry. On the other hand, we find Floer theoretically essential monotone Lagrangian tori, finitely covered by the monotone tori which we study in the An Milnor fibre. We …
The oriented link of the cyclic quotient singularity $\mathcal{X}_{p,q}$ is orientation-preserving diffeomorphic to the lens space $L(p,q)$ and carries the standard contact structure $ξ_{st}$. Lisca classified the Stein fillings of $(L(p,q), ξ_{st})$ up to diffeomorphisms and conjectured that they correspond bijectively through an {\it explicit} map to the Milnor fibers associated with the irreducible components (all of them being smoothing components) of the reduced miniversal space of deformations of $\mathcal{X}_{p,q}$. We prove this conjecture using the smoothing equations given by Christo…
We prove that any embedded Maslov index two analytic disc attached to a totally real torus in the complex two-dimensional affine space extends to an analytic filling provided that the torus is contained in a regular level set of a strictly plurisubharmonic function.
We describe the Stein handlebody diagrams of Milnor fibers of Brieskorn singularities $x^p + y^q + z^r = 0$. We also study the natural symplectic operation by exchanging two Stein fillings of the canonical contact structure on the links in the case $p = q = r$, where one of the fillings comes from the minimal resolution and the other is the Milnor fiber. We give two different interpretations of this operation, one as a symplectic sum and the other as a monodromy substitution in a Lefschetz fibration.
The sandwiched surface singularities are those rational surface singularities which dominate birationally smooth surface singularities. de Jong and van Straten showed that one can reduce the study of the deformations of a sandwiched surface singularity to the study of deformations of a 1-dimensional object, a so-called decorated plane curve singularity. In particular, the Milnor fibers corresponding to their various smoothing components may be reconstructed up to diffeomorphisms from those deformations of associated decorated curves which have only ordinary singularities. Part of the topology …
In this paper, we investigate a relation between rational blowdown surgery and minimal symplectic fillings of a given Seifert 3-manifold with a canonical contact structure. Consequently, we determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a minimal symplectic filling of a Seifert 3-manifold satisfying certain conditions to be obtained by a sequence of rational blowdowns from the minimal resolution of the corresponding weighted homogeneous surface singularity. Furthermore, as an application of the main results, we prove that every minimal symplectic filling of a large family of Seifert 3-mani…
Consider a Stein manifold M obtained by plumbing cotangent bundles of manifolds of dimension greater than or equal to 3 at points. We prove that the Fukaya category of closed exact Lagrangians with vanishing Maslov class in M is generated by the compact cores of the plumbing. As applications, we classify exact Lagrangian spheres in A2-Milnor fibres of arbitrary dimension, derive constraints on exact Lagrangian fillings of Legendrian unknots in disk cotangent bundles, and prove that the categorical equivalence given by the spherical twist in a homology sphere is typically not realised by any co…
We derive constraints on Lagrangian embeddings in completions of certain stable symplectic fillings with semisimple symplectic cohomologies. Manifolds with these properties can be constructed by generalizing the boundary connected sum operation to our setting, and are related to certain birational surgeries like blow-downs and flips. As a consequence, there are many non-toric (non-compact) monotone symplectic manifolds whose wrapped Fukaya categories are proper.
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 fully separating planar torsion 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 fil…
This is a book aimed at graduate students and researchers in symplectic geometry, based on a course I taught in 2019. The primary message is that the base of a Lagrangian torus fibration inherits an integral affine structure, which you can use to "read off" a lot of interesting geometry of the total space. Topics covered include: action-angle coordinates, symplectic reduction, toric manifolds, visible and tropical Lagrangians, almost toric systems, Milnor fibres of cyclic quotient singularities, mutation of polygons, non-toric blow-up, an almost toric view on Lisca's classification of fillings…
This paper investigates the symplectic and contact topology associated to circular spherical divisors. We classify, up to toric equivalence, all concave circular spherical divisors $ D $ that can be embedded symplectically into a closed symplectic 4-manifold and show they are all realized as symplectic log Calabi-Yau pairs if their complements are minimal. We then determine the Stein fillability and rational homology type of all minimal symplectic fillings for the boundary torus bundles of such $D$. When $ D $ is anticanonical and convex, we give explicit betti number bounds for Stein fillings…
We solve a problem on filling by Levi-flat hypersurfaces for a class of totally real 2-tori in a real 4-manifold with an almost complex structure tamed by an exact symplectic form. As an application we obtain a simple proof of Gromov's non-squeezing theorem in dimension 4 and new results on rigidity of symplectic structures.