Braids and symplectic four-manifolds with abelian fundamental group

We explain how a version of Floer homology can be used as an invariant of symplectic manifolds with $b_1>0$. As a concrete example, we look at four-manifolds produced from braids by a surgery construction. The outcome shows that the invariant is nontrivial; however, it is an open question whether it is stronger than the known ones.Comment: 9 pages, LaTe

Fukaya categories and deformations

This is an informal (and mostly conjectural) discussion of some aspects of Fukaya categories. We start by looking at exact symplectic manifolds which are obtained from a closed Calabi-Yau by removing a hyperplane section. We look at the possible geometric significance of Hochschild cohomology in this situation, and how one can try to get from the Fukaya category of the exact manifold to that of the closed Calabi-Yau. Also included is a brief discussion of the role of Lefschetz pencils, and a bit of general deformation theory. To appear in the Proceedings of the Beijing ICM

Picard-Lefschetz theory and dilating C^*-actions

We consider C^*-actions on Fukaya categories of exact symplectic manifolds. Such actions can be constructed by dimensional induction, going from the fibre of a Lefschetz fibration to its total space. We explore applications to the topology of Lagrangian submanifolds, with an emphasis on ease of computation.Comment: v3: appendectomy performed; to appear in Journal of Topolog