Strongly fillable contact 3-manifolds without Stein fillings

The Ozsvath-Szabo contact invariant is a complete classification invariant for tight contact structures on small Seifert fibered 3-manifolds which are L-spaces.

According to Lerman, compact connected toric contact 3-manifolds with a non-free toric action whose moment cone spans an angle greater than $\pi$ are overtwisted, thus non-fillable. In contrast, we show that all compact connected toric contact manifolds in dimension greater than three are weakly symplectically fillable and most of them are strongly symplectically fillable. The proof is based on the Lerman's classification of toric contact manifolds and on our observation that...

In this short note, we give examples of binding sums of contact 3-manifolds that do not preserve properties such as tightness or symplectic fillability. We also prove vanishing of the Heegaard Floer contact invariant for an infinite family of binding sums where the summands are Stein fillable. This recovers a result of Wendl and Latschev-Wendl. Along the way, we rectify a subtle computational error in a paper of Juhasz-Kang concerning the spectral order of a neighbourhood of ...

We introduce a new method to obstruct Liouville and weak fillability. Using this, we show that various rational homology 3-spheres admit strongly fillable contact structures without Liouville fillings, which extends the result of Ghiggini on a family of Brieskorn spheres. We also make partial progress on a conjecture of Ghiggini and Van-Horn-Morris.

We study weak versus strong symplectic fillability of some tight contact structures on torus bundles over the circle. In particular, we prove that almost all of these tight contact structures are weakly, but not strongly symplectically fillable. For the 3-torus this theorem was established by Eliashberg.

The aim of this paper is to address the following question: given a contact manifold $(\Sigma, \xi)$, what can be said about the aspherical symplectic manifolds $(W, \omega)$ bounded by $(\Sigma, \xi)$ ? We first extend a theorem of Eliashberg, Floer and McDuff to prove that under suitable assumptions the map from $H_{*}(\Sigma)$ to $H_{*}(W)$ induced by inclusion is surjective. We then apply this method in the case of contact manifolds having a contact embedding in $ {\mathb...

We prove that every strong symplectic filling of a planar contact manifold admits a symplectic Lefschetz fibration over the disk, and every strong filling of the 3-torus similarly admits a Lefschetz fibration over the annulus. It follows that strongly fillable planar contact structures are also Stein fillable, and all strong fillings of the 3-torus are equivalent up to symplectic deformation and blowup. These constructions result from a compactness theorem for punctured J-hol...

In this note we will determine which contact structures on manifolds obtained by certain surgeries on the right handed trefoil are Stein fillable and which are not. This continues a long line of research and shows that there seems to be few underlying patterns to when a contact structure is Stein fillable or not.

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 Giro...

We prove that any weakly symplectically fillable contact manifold is tight. Furthermore we verify the strong Weinstein conjecture for contact manifolds that appear as the concave boundary of a directed symplectic cobordism whose positive boundary satisfies the weak-filling condition and is overtwisted. Similar results are obtained in the presence of bordered Legendrian open books whose binding-complement has vanishing second Stiefel-Whitney class. The results are obtained via...