We construct four-dimensional symplectic cobordisms between contact three-manifolds generalizing an example of Eliashberg. One key feature is that any handlebody decomposition of one of these cobordisms must involve three-handles. The other key feature is that these cobordisms contain chains of symplectically embedded two-spheres of square zero. This, together with standard gauge theory, is used to show that any contact three-manifold of non-zero torsion (in the sense of Giroux) cannot be strongly symplectically fillable. John Etnyre pointed out to the author that the same argument together with compactness results for pseudo-holomorphic curves implies that any contact three-manifold of non-zero torsion satisfies the Weinstein conjecture. We also get examples of weakly symplectically fillable contact three-manifolds which are (strongly) symplectically cobordant to overtwisted contact three-manifolds, shedding new light on the structure of the set of contact three-manifolds equipped with the strong symplectic cobordism partial order.
We complete the classification of symplectic fillings of tight contact structures on lens spaces. In particular, we show that any symplectic filling $X$ of a virtually overtwisted contact structure on $L(p,q)$ has another symplectic structure that fills the universally tight contact structure on $L(p,q)$. Moreover, we show that the Stein filling of $L(p,q)$ with maximal second homology is given by the plumbing of disk bundles. We also consider the question of constructing symplectic cobordisms between lens spaces and report some partial results.
We prove that Manolescu and Woodward's Symplectic Instanton homology, and its twisted versions are natural, and define maps associated to four dimensional cobordisms within this theory. This allows one to define representations of the mapping class group and the fundamental group of a 3-manifold, and to have a geometric interpretation of the maps appearing in the long exact sequence for symplectic instanton homology, together with vanishing criterions.
In this note we make several observations concerning symplectic cobordisms. Among other things we show that every contact 3-manifold has infinitely many concave symplectic fillings and that all overtwisted contact 3-manifolds are ``symplectic cobordism equivalent.''
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 contact 3-manifolds which are symplectically cobordant to something overtwisted, or to the tight 3-sphere, or which admit symplectic caps containing symplectically embedded spheres with vanishing self-intersection. These constructions imply new and simplified proofs of several recent results involving fillability, planarity and non-separating contact type embeddin…
Symplectic Khovanov homology is an invariant of oriented links defined by Seidel and Smith and conjectured to be isomorphic to Khovanov homology. I define morphisms (up to a global sign ambiguity) between symplectic Khovanov homology groups, corresponding to isotopy classes of smooth link cobordisms in 4D between a fixed pair of links. These morphisms define a functor from the category of links and such cobordisms to the category of abelian groups and group homomorphisms up to a sign ambiguity. This provides an extra structure for symplectic Khovanov homology and more generally an isotopy inva…
Given two open books with equal pages we show the existence of an exact symplectic cobordism whose negative end equals the disjoint union of the contact manifolds associated to the given open books, and whose positive end induces the contact manifold associated to the open book with the same page and concatenated monodromy. Using similar methods we show the existence of strong fillings for contact manifolds associated with doubled open books, a certain class of fiber bundles over the circle obtained by performing the binding sum of two open books with equal pages and inverse monodromies. From …
Symplectic instanton homology is an invariant for closed oriented three-manifolds, defined by Manolescu and Woodward, which conjecturally corresponds to a symplectic version of a variant of Floer's instanton homology. In this thesis we study the behaviour of this invariant under connected sum, Dehn surgery, and four-dimensional cobordisms. We prove a Künneth-type formula for the connected sum : let $Y$ and $Y'$ be two closed oriented three-manifolds, we show that the symplectic instanton homology of their connected sum is isomorphic to the direct sum of the tensor product of their symplectic i…
We introduce constructions of exact Lagrangian cobordisms with cylindrical Legendrian ends and study their invariants which arise from Symplectic Field Theory. A pair $(X,L)$ consisting of an exact symplectic manifold $X$ and an exact Lagrangian cobordism $L\subset X$ which agrees with cylinders over Legendrian links $Λ_+$ and $Λ_-$ at the positive and negative ends induces a differential graded algebra (DGA) map from the Legendrian contact homology DGA of $Λ_+$ to that of $Λ_-$. We give a gradient flow tree description of the DGA maps for certain pairs $(X,L)$, which in turn yields a purely c…
We study relative symplectic cobordisms between contact submanifolds, and in particular relative symplectic cobordisms to the empty set, that we call hats. While we make some observations in higher dimensions, we focus on the case of transverse knots in the standard 3-sphere, and hats in blow-ups of the (punctured) complex projective planes. We apply the construction to give constraints on the algebraic topology of fillings of double covers of the 3-sphere branched over certain transverse quasipositive knots.
We give an explicit construction of the Honda--Kazez--Matić gluing maps in terms of contact handles. We use this to prove a duality result for turning a sutured manifold cobordism around, and to compute the trace in the sutured Floer TQFT. We also show that the decorated link cobordism maps on the hat version of link Floer homology defined by the first author via sutured manifold cobordisms and by the second author via elementary cobordisms agree.
The contact invariant is an element in the monopole Floer homology groups of an oriented closed three manifold canonically associated to a given contact structure. A non-vanishing contact invariant implies that the original contact structure is tight, so understanding its behavior under symplectic cobordisms is of interest if one wants to further exploit this property. By extending the gluing argument of Mrowka and Rollin to the case of a manifold with a cylindrical end, we will show that the contact invariant behaves naturally under a strong symplectic cobordism. As quick applications of the …
Each lens space has a canonical contact structure which lifts to the distribution of complex lines on the three-sphere. In this paper, we show that a symplectic homology cobordism between two lens spaces, which is given with the canonical contact structure on the boundary, must be diffeomorphic to the product of a lens space with the unit interval. As one of the main ingredients in the proof, we also derive in this paper the adjunction and intersection formulae for pseudoholomorphic curves in an almost complex 4-orbifold, extending the relevant work of Gromov and McDuff in the manifold setting…
Periodic Floer homology (PFH) is a Gromov-Floer type invariant for fibered three-manifolds with Hamiltonian structures. The cobordism maps on periodic Floer homology induced by symplectic cobordisms are currently only defined indirectly by using Seiberg-Witten theory. In this paper, we investigate the cobordism maps induced by a class of symplectic cobordisms constructed by P. Seidel, called elementary Lefschetz brations. We define the PFH cobordism maps induced by elementary Lefschetz fibrations in terms of holomorphic curves. Moreover, we compute these maps for some cases.
The main result of this paper states that a symplectic s-cobordism of elliptic 3-manifolds is diffeomorphic to a product (assuming a canonical contact structure on the boundary). Based on this theorem, we conjecture that a smooth s-cobordism of elliptic 3-manifolds is smoothly a product if its universal cover is smoothly a product. We explain how the conjecture fits naturally into the program of Taubes of constructing symplectic structures on an oriented smooth 4-manifold from generic self-dual harmonic forms. The paper also contains an auxiliary result of independent interest, which generaliz…
Given a symplectic manifold M, we consider a category with objects finite ordered families of Lagrangian submanifolds of M (subject to certain additional constraints) and with morphisms Lagrangian cobordisms relating them. We construct a functor that maps this category to a variant of the derived Fukaya category of M in a way that takes into account the triangulated structure of the latter.
In arXiv:1611.09927, we constructed a well-defined Lagrangian Floer invariant for any closed, oriented $3$-manifold $Y$ via the symplectic geometry of so-called traceless $\mathrm{SU}(2)$-character varieties. This invariant, $\mathrm{SI}(Y)$, which we refer to as the symplectic instanton homology of $Y$, was also shown to satisfy an exact triangle for Dehn surgeries on knots which is typical of Floer-theoretic invariants of $3$-manifolds. In this article, we demonstrate further structural properties of this symplectic instanton homology. For example, Floer theories are expected to roughly sati…
Lipshitz, Ozsváth and Thurston defined a bordered Heegaard Floer invariant CFDA for 3-manifolds with two boundary components, including mapping cylinders for surface diffeomorphisms. We define a related invariant for certain 4-dimensional cobordisms with corners, by associating a morphism F from CFDA(f) to CFDA(g) to each such cobordism between two mapping cylinders f and g. Like the Ozsváth-Szabó invariants of cobordisms between closed 3-manifolds, this morphism arises from counting holomorphic triangles on Heegaard triples. We demonstrate that the homotopy class of the morphism F only depend…
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 the homology cobordism group is generated by Stein fillable 3-manifolds. We also find obstructions on smooth embeddings: there exists 3-manifolds which cannot smoothly embed in a way that appropriately respect orientations in any symplectic manifold with weakly convex boundary. This embedding obstruction can also be used to detect exotic smooth structures on 4…
This paper presents two existence h-principles, the first for conformal symplectic structures on closed manifolds, and the second for leafwise conformal symplectic structures on foliated manifolds with non empty boundary. The latter h-principle allows to linearly deform certain codimension-$1$ foliations to contact structures. These results are essentially applications of the Borman-Eliashberg-Murphy h-principle for overtwisted contact structures and of the Eliashberg-Murphy symplectization of cobordisms, together with tools pertaining to foliated Morse theory, which are elaborated here.
It has been a central open problem in Heegaard Floer theory whether cobordisms of links induce homomorphisms on the associated link Floer homology groups. We provide an affirmative answer by introducing a natural notion of cobordism between sutured manifolds, and showing that such a cobordism induces a map on sutured Floer homology. This map is a common generalization of the hat version of the closed 3-manifold cobordism map in Heegaard Floer theory, and the contact gluing map defined by Honda, Kazez, and Matić. We show that sutured Floer homology, together with the above cobordism maps, forms…
We extract a nonnegative integer-valued invariant, which we call the "order of algebraic torsion", from the Symplectic Field Theory of a closed contact manifold, and show that its finiteness gives obstructions to the existence of symplectic fillings and exact symplectic cobordisms. A contact manifold has algebraic torsion of order zero if and only if it is algebraically overtwisted (i.e. has trivial contact homology), and any contact 3-manifold with positive Giroux torsion has algebraic torsion of order one (though the converse is not true). We also construct examples for each nonnegative k of…
We prove that an embedded cobordism between manifolds with boundary can be split into a sequence of right product and left product cobordisms, if the codimension of the embedding is at least two. This is a topological counterpart of the algebraic splitting theorem for embedded cobordisms of the first author, A. Nemethi and A. Ranicki. In the codimension one case, we provide a slightly weaker statement. We also give proofs of rearrangement and cancellation theorems for handles of embedded submanifolds with boundary.
We prove that a positive definite smooth four-manifold with $b_2^+ \geq 2$ and having either no 1-handles or no 3-handles cannot admit a symplectic structure.
We study 4-dimensional homology cobordisms without 3-handles, showing that they interact nicely with Thurston geometries, character varieties, and instanton and Heegaard Floer homologies. Using these, we derive obstructions to such cobordisms. As one example of these obstructions, we generalize other recent results on the behavior of knot Floer homology under ribbon concordances. Finally, we provide topological applications, including to Dehn surgery problems.
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…
We give two constructions of surfaces in simply-connected 4-manifolds with non simply-connected complements. One is an iteration of the twisted rim surgery introduced by the first author. We also construct, for any group G satisfying some simple conditions, a simply-connected symplectic manifold containing a symplectic surface whose complement has fundamental group G. In each case, we produce infinitely many smoothly inequivalent surfaces that are equivalent up to smooth s-cobordism and hence are topologically equivalent for good groups.
The main purpose of this paper is to summarize the basic ingredients, illustrated with examples, of a pseudoholomorphic curve theory for symplectic 4-orbifolds. These are extensions of relevant work of Gromov, McDuff and Taubes on symplectic 4-manifolds concerning pseudoholomorphic curves and Seiberg-Witten theory. They form the technical backbone of the proof that a symplectic s-cobordism of elliptic 3-manifolds (with a canonical contact structure on the boundary) is smoothly a product. One interesting feature of the theory is that existence of pseudoholomorphic curves gives certain restricti…
Round handles are affiliated with smooth 4-manifolds in two major ways: 5-dimensional round handles appear extensively as the building blocks in cobordisms between 4-manifolds, whereas 4-dimensional round handles are the building blocks of broken Lefschetz fibrations on them. The purpose of this article is to shed more light on these interactions. We prove that if X and X' are cobordant closed smooth 4-manifolds with the same euler characteristics, and if one of them is simply-connected, then there is a cobordism between them which is composed of round 2-handles only, and therefore one can pas…
A standard convexity condition on the boundary of a symplectic manifold involves an induced positive contact form (and contact structure) on the boundary; the corresponding concavity condition involves an induced negative contact form. We present two methods of symplectically attaching 2-handles to convex boundaries of symplectic 4-manifolds along links transverse to the induced contact structures. One method results in concave boundaries and depends on a fibration of the link complement over S^1; in this case the handles can be attached with any framing larger than a lower bound determined by…
A key tool in our earlier work on ends of manifolds high-dimensional manifolds was an ability to embed cobordisms provided by the Quillen Plus Construction into those ends. Here we develop a `spherical modification' trick which provides a constructive approach to obtaining such embeddings. More importantly, this approach allows for more general embedding results. In this paper we develop generalizations of the plus construction and show how the corresponding cobordisms can be embedded in manifolds satisfying appropriate fundamental group properties. Results obtained here play an important role…
We develop a calculus of surgery data, called bridged links, which involves besides links also pairs of balls that describe one-handle attachements. As opposed to the usual link calculi of Kirby and others this description uses only elementary, local moves(namely modifications and isolated cancellations), and it is valid also on non-simply connected and disconnected manifolds. In particular, it allows us to give a presentation of a 3-manifold by doing surgery on any other 3-manifold with the same boundary. Bridged link presentations on unions of handlebodies are used to give a Cerf-theoretical…
We prove that every closed, connected contact 3-manifold can be obtained from the 3-sphere with its standard contact structure by contact surgery of coefficient plus or minus 1 along a Legendrian link. As a corollary, we derive a result of Etnyre and Honda about symplectic cobordisms (in slightly stronger form).
Motivated by various possible generalizations of Taubes's \(SW=Gr\) theorem [T] to Floer-theoretic setting, we prove certain variants of Taubes's convergence theorem in \cite{T} (the first part of his proof of \(SW=Gr\)). In place of the closed symplectic 4-manifold considered in [T], this article considers non-compact manifolds with cylindrical ends, equipped with a self-dual harmonic 2-form with non-degenerate zeroes. This extends and simplifies some central technical ingredients of the author's prior work in [LT] and [KLT5]. Other expected applications include: extending the \(HM=PFH\) theo…
We generalize the familiar notions of overtwistedness and Giroux torsion in 3-dimensional contact manifolds, defining an infinite hierarchy of local filling obstructions called planar torsion, whose integer-valued order $k \ge 0$ can be interpreted as measuring a gradation in "degrees of tightness" of contact manifolds. We show in particular that any contact manifold with planar torsion admits no contact type embeddings into any closed symplectic 4-manifold, and has vanishing contact invariant in Embedded Contact Homology, and we give examples of contact manifolds that have planar k-torsion fo…
A symplectic rational cuspidal curve with positive self-intersection number admits a concave neighborhood, and thus a corresponding contact manifold on the boundary. In this article, we study symplectic fillings of such contact manifolds, providing a complementary perspective to our earlier article on symplectic isotopy classes of rational cuspidal curves. We explore aspects of these symplectic fillings through Stein handlebodies and rational blow-downs. We give examples of such contact manifolds which are identifiable as links of normal surface singularities, other examples which admit no sym…
We construct infinitely many non-diffeomorphic examples of $5$-dimensional contact manifolds which are tight, admit no strong fillings, and do not have Giroux torsion. We obtain obstruction results for symplectic cobordisms, for which we give a proof not relying on the polyfold abstract perturbation scheme for SFT. These results are part of the author's PhD thesis, and are the first applications of higher-dimensional Siefring intersection theory for holomorphic curves and hypersurfaces.
In this paper we give explicit, handle-by-handle constructions of concave symplectic fillings of all closed, oriented contact 3-manifolds. These constructions combine recent results of Giroux relating contact structures and open book decompositions of 3-manifolds, earlier results of the author on attaching 4-dimensional symplectic 2-handles along transverse links, and some tricks with mapping class groups of compact surfaces with non-empty boundary.
We present the Round Handle Problem, proposed by Freedman and Krushkal. It asks whether a collection of links, which contains the Generalised Borromean Rings, are slice in a 4-manifold R constructed from adding round handles to the four ball. A negative answer would contradict the union of the surgery conjecture and the s-cobordism conjecture for 4-manifolds with free fundamental group.
We show that every positive definite closed 4-manifold with $b_2^+>1$ and without 1-handles has a vanishing stable cohomotopy Seiberg-Witten invariant, and thus admits no symplectic structure. We also show that every closed oriented 4-manifold with $b_2^+\not\equiv 1$ and $b_2^-\not\equiv 1\pmod{4}$ and without 1-handles admits no symplectic structure for at least one orientation of the manifold. In fact, relaxing the 1-handle condition, we prove these results under more general conditions which are much easier to verify.
We develop Morse theory for manifolds with boundary. Besides standard and expected facts like the handle cancellation theorem and the Morse lemma for manifolds with boundary, we prove that, under a topological assumption, a critical point in the interior of a Morse function can be moved to the boundary, where it splits into a pair of boundary critical points. As an application, we prove that every cobordism of manifolds with boundary splits as a union of left product cobordisms and right product cobordisms.
We show that for any n > 3 there exists an equivalence functor from the category of n-fold connected simple coverings of B^3 x [0, 1] branched over ribbon surface tangles up to certain local ribbon moves, to the category Chb^{3+1} of orientable relative 4-dimensional 2-handlebody cobordisms up to 2-deformations. As a consequence, we obtain an equivalence theorem for simple coverings of S^3 branched over links, which provides a complete solution to the long-standing Fox-Montesinos covering moves problem. This last result generalizes to coverings of any degree results by the second author and Ap…
We show that only finitely many links in a closed 3-manifold share the same complement, up to twists along discs and annuli. Using the same techniques, we prove that by adding 2-handles on the same link we get only finitely many smooth cobordisms between two given closed 3-manifolds. As a consequence, there are finitely many smooth closed 4-manifolds constructed from some Kirby diagram with bounded number of crossings, discs, and strands, or from some Turaev special shadow with bounded number of vertices. (These are the 4-dimensional analogues of Heegaard diagrams and special spines for 3-mani…
This paper is the second part of our work on 4-dimensional 2-handlebodies. In the first part (arXiv:math.GT/0407032) it is shown that up to certain set of local moves, connected simple coverings of B^4 branched over ribbon surfaces, bijectively represent connected orientable 4-dimensional 2-handlebodies up to 2-deformations (handle slides and creations/cancellations of handles of index <= 2). We factor this bijective correspondence through a map onto the closed morphisms in a universal braided category freely generated by a Hopf algebra object H. In this way we obtain a complete algebraic desc…
We prove an analogue of the Kotschick-Morgan conjecture in the context of SO(3) monopoles, obtaining a formula relating the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten invariants of smooth four-manifolds using the SO(3)-monopole cobordism. The main technical difficulty in the SO(3)-monopole program relating the Seiberg-Witten and Donaldson invariants has been to compute intersection pairings on links of strata of reducible SO(3) monopoles, namely the moduli spaces of Seiberg-Witten monopoles lying in lower-level strata of the Uhlenbeck compactification of the moduli space of SO(3) monopoles [arXiv:dg-ga/9710…
