7 papers
An Unexpected Rational Blowdown
Márton Beke, Olga Plamenevskaya, Laura Starkston
The rational blowdown operation in 4-manifold topology replaces a neighborhood of a configuration of spheres by a rational homology ball. Such configurations typically arise from r…
Sandwiched singularities and nearly Lefschetz fibrations
Olga Plamenevskaya, Laura Starkston
We study Milnor fibers and symplectic fillings of links of sandwiched singularities, with the goal of contrasting their algebro-geometric deformation theory and symplectic topology…
Contact 3-manifolds that admit a non-free toric action
Aleksandra Marinković, Laura Starkston
We classify contact toric 3-manifolds up to contactomorphism, through explicit descriptions, building off of work by Lerman [Lerman03]. As an application, we classify all contact s…
Properties of contact toric structures and concave boundaries of linear plumbings
Aleksandra Marinković, Jo Nelson, Ana Rechtman +3
We consider plumbings of symplectic disk bundles over spheres admitting concave contact boundary, with the goal of understanding the geometric properties of the boundary contact st…
The contact cut graph and a Weinstein -invariant
Nickolas Castro, Gabriel Islambouli, Jie Min +3
We define and study the contact cut graph which is an analogue of Hatcher and Thurston's cut graph for contact geometry, inspired by contact Heegaard splittings. We show how orient…
Multisections with divides and Weinstein 4-manifolds
Gabriel Islambouli, Laura Starkston
We show how to encode a Weinstein 4-manifold using a multisection diagram with divides, which is a sequence of cut systems on a surface, together with a separating collection of cu…
Rational cuspidal curves and symplectic fillings
Marco Golla, Laura Starkston
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 articl…