Abstract
We introduce symplectic Calabi-Yau caps to obtain new obstructions to exact fillings. In particular, they imply that any exact filling of the standard contact structure on the unit cotangent bundle of a hyperbolic surface has vanishing first Chern class and has the same integral homology and intersection form as its disk cotangent bundle. This gives evidence to a conjecture that all of its exact fillings are diffeomorphic to the disk cotangent bundle. As a result, we also obtain the first infinite family of Stein fillable contact 3-manifolds with uniform bounds on the Betti numbers of its exact fillings but admitting minimal strong fillings of arbitrarily large b2. Moreover, we introduce the notion of symplectic uniruled/adjunction caps and uniruled/ adjunction contact structures to present a unified picture to the existing finiteness results on the topological invariants of exact/strong fillings of a contact 3-manifold. As a byproduct, we find new classes of contact 3-manifolds with the finiteness properties and extend Wand's obstruction of planar contact 3-manifolds to uniruled/adjunction contact structures with complexity zero.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 159-187 |
| Number of pages | 29 |
| Journal | Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society |
| Volume | 114 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2017 London Mathematical Society.