SFT COMPUTATIONS AND INTERSECTION THEORY IN HIGHER-DIMENSIONAL CONTACT MANIFOLDS

I construct infinitely many nondiffeomorphic examples of $5$ -dimensional contact manifolds which are tight, admit no strong fillings and do not have Giroux torsion. I obtain obstruction results for symplectic cobordisms, for which I give a proof not relying on the polyfold abstract perturbation scheme for Symplectic Field Theory (SFT). These results are part of my PhD thesis [23], and are the first applications of higher-dimensional Siefring intersection theory for holomorphic curves and hypersurfaces, as outlined in [23, 24], as a prequel to [30].

Open books and exact symplectic cobordisms

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 this we conclude, following an outline by Wendl, that the complement of the binding of an open book cannot contain any local filling obstruction. Given a contact [Formula: see text]-manifold, according to Eliashberg there is a symplectic cobordism to a fibration over the circle with symplectic fibers. We extend this result to higher dimensions recovering a recent result by Dörner–Geiges–Zehmisch. Our cobordisms can also be thought of as the result of the attachment of a generalized symplectic [Formula: see text]-handle.

Symplectic cobordisms and the strong Weinstein conjecture

We study holomorphic spheres in certain symplectic cobordisms and derive information about periodic Reeb orbits in the concave end of these cobordisms from the non-compactness of the relevant moduli spaces. We use this to confirm the strong Weinstein conjecture (predicting the existence of null-homologous Reeb links) for various higher-dimensional contact manifolds, including contact type hypersurfaces in subcritical Stein manifolds and in some cotangent bundles. The quantitative character of this result leads to the definition of a symplectic capacity.