This text is a set of lecture notes for a series of four talks given at I.P.A.M., Los Angeles, on March 18-20, 2003. The first lecture provides a quick overview of symplectic topology and its main tools: symplectic manifolds, almost-complex structures, pseudo-holomorphic curves, Gromov-Witten invariants and Floer homology. The second and third lectures focus on symplectic Lefschetz pencils: existence (following Donaldson), monodromy, and applications to symplectic topology, in particular the connection to Gromov-Witten invariants of symplectic 4-manifolds (following Smith) and to Fukaya categories (following Seidel). In the last lecture, we offer an alternative description of symplectic 4-manifolds by viewing them as branched covers of the complex projective plane; the corresponding monodromy invariants and their potential applications are discussed.
We determine the Lagrangian monodromy group L(T) and the smooth monodromy group S(T) of a Clifford torus T in the symplectic 4-space. We show that L(T) is isomorphic to the infinite dihedral group, and S(T) is generated by three reflections. We give explicit formulas for both groups. We also show that if a Lagrangian torus is smoothly isotopic to a Clifford torus then the smooth isotopy can be chosen to be Lagrangian outside of a disc.
We define new Hamiltonian isotopy invariants for a monotone Lagrangian torus embedded in a symplectic 4-manifold. We show that, in the standard symplectic 4-space, these invariants distinguish a monotone Clifford torus from a Chekanov torus.
We formulate certain sufficient conditions for the symplectic monodromy of an isolated quasihomogeneous singularity to be of infinite order in the relative symplectic mapping class group of the Milnor fibre and give a proof using Maslov classes, stability theory for Lagrangian folds resp. stable Morse theory for generating families as well as algebraic results about relative cohomology of smoothings of isolated singularities. Our conditions being slightly more restrictive than Seidel's, in contrary to Seidel's proof, we do not use Floer theory to derive this result. An alternative approach usi…
We derive a new Hamiltonian formulation of Schlesinger equations in terms of the dynamical $r$-matrix structure. The corresponding symplectic form is shown to be the pullback, under the monodromy map, of a natural symplectic form on the extended monodromy manifold. We show that Fock-Goncharov coordinates are log-canonical for the symplectic form on the extended monodromy manifold. Using these coordinates we define the symplectic potential on the monodromy manifold and interpret the isomonodromic tau-function as the generating function of the monodromy map. This, in particular, solves a recent …
A natural way of generalising Hamiltonian toric manifolds is to permit the presence of generic isolated singularities for the moment map. For a class of such ``almost-toric 4-manifolds'' which admits a Hamiltonian $S^1$-action we show that one can associate a group of convex polygons that generalise the celebrated moment polytopes of Atiyah, Guillemin-Sternberg. As an application, we derive a Duistermaat-Heckman formula demonstrating a strong effect of the possible monodromy of the underlying integrable system.
We study a symplectic surgery operation we call unchaining, which effectively reduces the second Betti number and the symplectic Kodaira dimension at the same time. Using unchaining, we give novel constructions of symplectic Calabi-Yau surfaces from complex surfaces of general type, as well as from rational and ruled surfaces via the natural inverse of this operation. Combining the unchaining surgery with others, which all correspond to certain monodromy substitutions for Lefschetz pencils, we provide further applications, such as a complete resolution of a conjecture of Stipsicz on the existe…
After reviewing recent results on symplectic Lefschetz pencils and symplectic branched covers of CP^2, we describe a new construction of maps from symplectic manifolds of any dimension to CP^2 and the associated monodromy invariants. We also show that a dimensional induction process makes it possible to describe any compact symplectic manifold by a series of words in braid groups and a word in a symmetric group.
We initiate a study of positive multisections of Lefschetz fibrations via positive factorizations in framed mapping class groups of surfaces. Using our methods, one can effectively capture various interesting symplectic surfaces in symplectic 4-manifolds as multisections, such as Seiberg-Witten basic classes and exceptional classes, or branched loci of compact Stein surfaces as branched coverings of the 4-ball. Various problems regarding the topology of symplectic 4-manifolds, such as the smooth classification of symplectic Calabi-Yau 4-manifolds, can be translated to combinatorial problems in…
We encode the variation structure of a quasihomogeneous polynomial with an isolated singularity as introduced by Nemethi in a set of spectral flows of the signature operator on the Milnor bundle by varying global elliptic boundary conditions in a specific way using the quasihomogeneous circle action on the Brieskorn lattice. For this, we use adiabatic techniques and well-known results on spectral flow and Maslov index. Furthermore we interpret the inequality of a certain member of this family of spectral flows with a spectral flow induced by a Reeb flow on the boundary of the Milnor fibre as g…
These are notes from lectures given at the Clay Institute Summer School on "Floer homology, gauge theory and low-dimensional topology" (Budapest, 2004). The first part describes as background some of the geometry of symplectic fibre bundles and their monodromy. The second part, overviewing joint work with Paul Seidel, applies these general ideas and Floer cohomology to certain fibre bundles that arise naturally in Lie theory. This constructs an invariant of oriented links in the three-sphere which is conjecturally equal to Khovanov's combinatorial homology theory.
We revisit symplectic properties of the monodromy map for Fuchsian systems on the Riemann sphere. We extend previous results of Hitchin, Alekseev-Malkin and Korotkin-Samtleben where it was shown that the monodromy map is a Poisson morphism between the Kirillov-Kostant Poisson structure on the space of coefficients, on one side, and the Goldman bracket on the monodromy character variety on the other. The extension is provided by defining larger spaces on both sides which are equipped with symplectic structures naturally projecting to the canonical ones. On the coefficient side our symplectic st…
In this paper, we prove the existence of certain symplectic conifold transitions on all $CP^{1}$-bundles over symplectic 4--manifolds, which generalizes Smith, Thomas and Yau's examples of symplectic conifold transitions on trivial $CP^{1}$-bundles over Kähler surfaces. Our main result is to determine the diffeomorphism types of such symplectic conifold transitions of $CP^{1}$-bundles. In particular, this implies that in the case of trivial $CP^{1}$-bundles over projective surfaces, Smith, Thomas and Yau's examples of symplectic conifold transitions are diffeomorphic to Kähler 3--folds.
This article analyzes the interplay between symplectic geometry in dimension four and the invariants for smooth four-manifolds constructed using holomorphic triangles introduced in math.SG/0110169. Specifically, we establish a non-vanishing result for the invariants of symplectic four-manifolds, which leads to new proofs of the indecomposability theorem for symplectic four-manifolds and the symplectic Thom conjecture. As a new application, we generalize the indecomposability theorem to splittings of four-manifolds along a certain class of three-manifolds obtained by plumbings of spheres. This …
We develop a new algebraic theory of positive braids and conjugacy classes in the braid group $B_3$. We use our theory to establish a complete classification of isotopy classes of degree three symplectic curves in $\mathbb{CP}^2$ with only $A_n$-singularities for $n\geq 1$ (an $A_n$-singularity is locally modelled by the equation $z^2 = w^n$) independent of Gromov's theory of pseudoholomorphic curves. We show that if $C$ and $C'$ are degree three symplectic curves in $\mathbb{CP}^2$ with the same numbers of $A_n$-singularities for each $n\geq 1$, then $C$ is isotopic to $C'$. Furthermore, our …
This paper introduces two-dimensional diagrams that are slight generalizations of moment map images for toric four-manifolds and catalogs techniques for reading topological and symplectic properties of a symplectic four-manifold from these diagrams. The paper offers a purely topological approach to toric manifolds as well as methods for visualizing other manifolds, including the K3 surface, and for visualizing certain surgeries. Most of the techniques extend to higher dimensions.
The topology of symplectic 4-manifolds is related to that of singular plane curves via the concept of branched covers. Thus, various classification problems concerning symplectic 4-manifolds can be reformulated as questions about singular plane curves. Moreover, using braid monodromy, these can in turn be reformulated in the language of braid group factorizations. While the results mentioned in this paper are not new, we hope that they will stimulate interest in these questions, which remain essentially wide open.
We consider circle bundles over compact three-manifolds with symplectic total spaces. We show that the base of such a space must be irreducible or the product of the two-sphere with the circle. We then deduce that such a bundle admits a symplectic form if and only if it admits one that is invariant under the circle action in three special cases: namely if the base is Seifert fibered, has vanishing Thurston norm, or if the total space admits a Lefschetz fibration.
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 handlebody and monodromy representations for a certain subclass of broken Lefschetz fibrations/pencils, while showing that all near-symplectic closed 4-manifolds can be supported by these a la Auroux, Donaldson, Katzarkov. Various constructions of broken Lefschetz fibrations and a generalization of the symplectic fiber sum operation to the near-symplectic se…
Every compact symplectic 4-manifold can be realized as a branched cover of the complex projective plane branched along a symplectic curve with cusp and node singularities; the covering map is induced by a triple of sections of a "very ample" line bundle. In this paper, we give an explicit formula describing the behavior of the braid monodromy invariants of the branch curve upon degree doubling of the linear system (from a very ample bundle $L^k$ to $L^{2k}$). As a consequence, we derive a similar degree doubling formula for the mapping class group monodromy of Donaldson's symplectic Lefschetz …
We prove that any symplectic 4-manifold which is not a rational or ruled surface, after sufficiently many blow-ups, admits an arbitrary number of nonisomorphic Lefschetz fibrations of the same genus which cannot be obtained from one another via Luttinger surgeries. This generalizes results of Park and Yun who constructed pairs of nonisomorphic Lefschetz fibrations on knot surgered elliptic surfaces. In turn, we prove that there are monodromy factorizations of Lefschetz pencils which have the same characteristic numbers but cannot be obtained from each other via partial conjugations by Dehn twi…
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 …
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 examine open books with powers of fibered Dehn twists as monodromy. The resulting contact manifolds can be thought of as Boothby-Wang orbibundles over symplectic orbifolds. Using the mean Euler characteristic of equivariant symplectic homology we can distinguish these contact manifolds and hence show that some fibered Dehn twists are not symplectically isotopic to the identity relative to the boundary. This complements results of Biran and Giroux.
This article sketches various ideas in contact geometry that have become useful in low-dimensional topology. Specifically we (1) outline the proof of Eliashberg and Thurston's results concerning perturbations of foliatoins into contact structures, (2) discuss Eliashberg and Weinstein's symplectic handle attachments, and (3) briefly discuss Giroux's insights into open book decompositions and contact geometry. Bringing these pieces together we discuss the construction of ``symplectic caps'' which are a key tool in the application of contact/symplectic geometry to low-dimensional topology.
A near-symplectic structure on a 4-manifold is a closed 2-form that is symplectic away from the 1-dimensional submanifold along which it vanishes and that satisfies a certain transversality condition along this vanishing locus. We investigate near-symplectic 4-manifolds equipped with singular Lagrangian torus fibrations which are locally induced by effective Hamiltonian torus actions. We show how such a structure is completely characterized by a singular integral affine structure on the base of the fibration whenever the vanishing locus is nonempty. The base equipped with this geometric struct…
We construct simply connected, minimal, symplectic 4-manifolds with exotic smooth structures and each with one Seiberg-Witten basic class up to sign, on the Noether line and between the Noether and half Noether lines by star surgeries introduced by Karakurt and Starkston, and by using complex singularities. We also construct certain configurations of complex singularities in the rational elliptic surfaces geometrically, without using any monodromy arguments. By using these configurations, we give symplectic embeddings of star shaped plumbings inside (some blow-ups of) elliptic surfaces.
This is a survey about certain "almost homomorphisms" and "almost linear" functionals (called quasi-morphisms and quasi-states) in symplectic topology and their applications to Hamiltonian dynamics, functional-theoretic properties of Poisson brackets and algebraic and metric properties of symplectomorphism groups.
A Poisson manifold $(M^{2n},\p)$ is $b$-symplectic if $\bigwedge^n\p$ is transverse to the zero section. In this paper we apply techniques native to Symplectic Topology to address questions pertaining to $b$-symplectic manifolds. We provide constructions of $b$-symplectic structures on open manifolds by Gromov's $h$-principle, and of $b$-symplectic manifolds with a prescribed singular locus, by means of surgeries.
This note collects a number of standard statements in Riemannian geometry and in Sobolev-space theory that play a prominent role in analytic approaches to symplectic topology. These include relations between connections and complex structures, estimates on exponential-like maps, and dependence of constants in Sobolev and elliptic estimates.
Schwarz showed that when a closed symplectic manifold (M,\om) is symplectically aspherical (i.e. the symplectic form and the first Chern class vanish on π_2(M)) then the spectral invariants, which are initially defined on the universal cover of the Hamiltonian group, descend to the Hamiltonian group Ham (M,\om). In this note we describe less stringent conditions on the Chern class and quantum homology of M under which the (asymptotic) spectral invariants descend to Ham (M,\om). For example, they descend if the quantum multiplication of M is undeformed and H_2(M) has rank >1, or if the minimal …
This is a light survey article about the origins of contact and symplectic topology in dynamics and the more recent developments in the field. In lieu of formulas, numerous anecdotes are given.
We outline a program for incorporating holomorphic curves with Lagrangian boundary conditions into symplectic field theory, with an emphasis on ideas, geometric intuition, and a description of the resulting algebraic structures.
We study the symplectic topology of certain K3 surfaces (including the "mirror quartic" and "mirror double plane"), equipped with certain Kähler forms. In particular, we prove that the symplectic Torelli group may be infinitely generated, and derive new constraints on Lagrangian tori. The key input, via homological mirror symmetry, is a result of Bayer and Bridgeland on the autoequivalence group of the derived category of an algebraic K3 surface of Picard rank one.
We initiate the study of the $C^0$ symplectic mapping class group, i.e. the group of isotopy classes of symplectic homeomorphisms. We prove that none of the different powers of the square of the Dehn-Seidel twist belong to the same connected component of the group of symplectic homeomorphisms of certain Liouville domains. This generalizes to the $C^0$ setting a celebrated result of Seidel. In other words, we obtain the non-triviality of the $C^0$ symplectic mapping class group in these domains and in fact an element of infinite order. For that purpose, we develop a method coming from Floer the…
Via considerations of symplectic reduction, monodromy, mirror symmetry and Chern-Simons functionals, a conjecture is proposed on the existence of special Lagrangians in the hamiltonian deformation class of a given Lagrangian submanifold of a Calabi-Yau manifold. It involves a stability condition for graded Lagrangians, and can be proved for the simple case of $T^2$.
Let X be a minimal surface of general type with positive geometric genus ($b_+ > 1$) and let $K^2$ be the square of its canonical class. Building on work of Khodorovskiy and Rana, we prove that if X develops a Wahl singularity of length $\ell$ in a Q-Gorenstein degeneration, then $\ell \leq 4K^2 + 7$. This improves on the current best-known upper bound due to Lee ($\ell \leq 400(K^2)^4$). Our bound follows from a stronger theorem constraining symplectic embeddings of certain rational homology balls in surfaces of general type. In particular, we show that if the rational homology ball $B_{p,1}$…
In this paper we survey some recent works that take the first steps toward establishing bilateral connections between symplectic geometry and several other fields, namely, asymptotic geometric analysis, classical convex geometry, and the theory of normed spaces.
We overview our recent work defining and studying normal crossings varieties and subvarieties in symplectic topology. This work answers a question of Gromov on the feasibility of introducing singular (sub)varieties into symplectic topology in the case of normal crossings singularities. It also provides a necessary and sufficient condition for smoothing normal crossings symplectic varieties. In addition, we explain some connections with other areas of mathematics and discuss a few directions for further research.
We study smooth projective varieties with small dual variety using methods from symplectic topology. We prove the affine parts of such varieties are subcritical, and that the hyperplane class is invertible in their quantum cohomology. We derive several topological and algebraic geometric consequences from that. The main tool in our work is the Seidel representation associated to Hamiltonian fibrations.
This is mainly a survey of recent work on algebraic ways to ``measure'' moduli spaces of connecting trajectories in Morse and Floer theories as well as related applications to symplectic topology. The paper also contains some new results. In particular, we show that the methods of a previous work (http://fr.arXiv.org/find/math/1/barraud/0/1/0/2004/3/0) continue to work in general symplectic manifolds (without any connectivity conditions) but under the bubbling threshold.
We analyze four-dimensional symplectic manifolds of type $X=S^1 \times M^3$ where $M^3$ is an open $3$-manifold admitting inequivalent fibrations leading to inequivalent symplectic structures on $X$. For the case where $M^3 \subset S^3$ is the complement of a $4$-component link constructed by McMullen-Taubes, we provide a general algorithm for computing the monodromy of the fibrations explicitly. We use this algorithm to show that certain inequivalent symplectic structures are distinguished by the dimensions of the primitive cohomologies of differential forms on $X$. We also calculate the prim…
The main purpose of this paper is to give a topological and symplectic classification of completely integrable Hamiltonian systems in terms of characteristic classes and other local and global invariants.
We prove that a $C^0$--small area preserving homeomorphism of a closed surface with vanishing mass flow can not displace a topological disk of large area. This resolves the displaced disks problem posed by F. Béguin, S. Crovisier, and F. Le Roux.
We compute the homotopy type of the space of T^n-equivariant symplectic embeddings from the standard 2n-dimensional ball of some fixed radius into a 2n-dimensional symplectic-toric manifold M, and use this computation to define a Z-valued step function on the positive real line which is an invariant of the symplectic-toric type of M. We conclude with a discussion of the partially equivariant case of this result.
We introduce topological notions of normal crossings symplectic divisor and variety and establish that they are equivalent, in a suitable sense, to the desired geometric notions. Our proposed concept of equivalence of associated topological and geometric notions fits ideally with important constructions in symplectic topology. This partially answers Gromov's question on the feasibility of defining singular symplectic (sub)varieties and lays foundation for rich developments in the future. In subsequent papers, we establish a smoothability criterion for symplectic normal crossings varieties, in …
We examine symplectic topological features of certain family of monotone Lagrangian submanifolds in CP^n. Firstly, we give a cohomological restriction for Lagrangian submanifolds in CP^n whose first integral homologies are 3-torsion. In particular, in the case where n=5,8, we prove the cohomologies with coefficients in Z_2 of such Lagrangian submanifolds are isomorphic to that of SU(3)/(SO(3) Z_3) and SU(3)/Z_3, respectively. Secondly, we calculate the Floer cohomology of a monotone Lagrangian submanifold SU(p)/Z_p in CP^{p^2-1} with coefficients in Z_2 by using Biran-Cornea's theory.
These notes are based on a course that took place at the Université de Nantes in June 2011 during the "Trimester on Contact and Symplectic Topology". We will explain how holomorphic curves can be used to study symplectic fillings of a given contact manifold. Our main goal consists in showing that certain contact manifolds do not admit any symplectic filling at all.
A symplectic structure is canonically constructed on any manifold endowed with a topological linear k-system whose fibers carry suitable symplectic data. As a consequence, the classification theory for Lefschetz pencils in the context of symplectic topology is analogous to the corresponding theory arising in differential topology.
