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

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

More about vanishing cycles and mutation

The paper continues the discussion of symplectic aspects of Picard-Lefschetz theory begun in "Vanishing cycles and mutation" (this archive). There we explained how to associate to a suitable fibration over a two-dimensional disc a triangulated category, the "derived directed Fukaya category" which describes the structure of the vanishing cycles. The present second part serves two purposes. Firstly, it contains various kinds of algebro-geometric examples, including the "mirror manifold" of the projective plane. Secondly there is a (largely conjectural) discussion of more advanced topics, such as (i) Hochschild cohomology, (ii) relations between Picard-Lefschetz theory and Morse theory, (iii) a proposed "dimensional reduction" algorithm for doing certain Floer cohomology computations.Comment: 33 pages, LaTeX2e, 9 eps figure

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