Strongly fillable contact 3-manifolds without Stein fillings

In this note we construct infinitely many distinct simply connected Stein fillings of a certain infinite family of contact 3--manifolds.

In this article we provide an infinite family of weakly symplectically fillable contact structures with trivial Ozsvath-Szabo contact invariants over Z/2Z. As a consequence of this fact, we show how Heegaard-Floer theory can distinguish between weakly and strongly fillable contact structures.

We exhibit tight contact structures on 3-manifolds that do not admit any symplectic fillings.

In this article we present infinitely many 3-manifolds admitting infinitely many universally tight contact structures each with trivial Ozsvath-Szabo contact invariants. By known properties of these invariants the contact structures constructed here are non weakly symplectically fillable.

We give examples of contact structures which admit exact symplectic fillings, but no Stein fillings, answering a question of Ghiggini.

In this survey article we describe different ways of embedding fillings of contact 3-manifolds into closed symplectic 4-manifolds.

We show that there are vast families of contact 3-manifolds each member of which admits infinitely many Stein fillings with arbitrarily big euler characteristics and arbitrarily small signatures ---which disproves a conjecture of Stipsicz and Ozbagci. To produce our examples, we set a framework which generalizes the construction of Stein structures on allowable Lefschetz fibrations over the 2-disk to those over any orientable base surface, along with the construction of conta...

Infinitely many contact 3-manifolds each admitting infinitely many, pairwise non-diffeomorphic Stein fillings are constructed. We use Lefschetz fibrations in our constructions and compute their first homologies to distinguish the fillings.

For any integer $n\geq 2$, we construct an infinite family of Stein fillable contact $(4n-1)$-manifolds each of which admits infinitely many pairwise homotopy inequivalent Stein fillings.

This paper provides a topological method for filling contact structures on the connected sums of $S^2\times S^3$. Examples of nonsymplectomorphic strong fillings of homotopy equivalent contact structures with vanishing first Chern class on $\#_k S^2\times S^3$ $(k\geq2)$ are produced.