Simply-connected K-contact and Sasakian manifolds of dimension 7

We construct a compact simply-connected 7-dimensional manifold admitting a K-contact structure but not a Sasakian structure. We also study rational homotopy properties of such manifolds, proving in particular that a simply-connected 7-dimensional Sasakian manifold has vanishing cup-product on the second cohomology and that it is formal if and only if all its triple Massey products vanish.Comment: 14 pages, some references added, several typos are correcte

Weakly Lefschetz symplectic manifolds

The harmonic cohomology of a Donaldson symplectic submanifold and of an Auroux symplectic submanifold are compared with that of its ambient space. We also study symplectic manifolds satisfying a weakly Lefschetz property, that is, the $s$-Lefschetz propery. In particular, we consider the symplectic blow-ups of the complex projective space along weakly Lefschetz symplectic submanifolds. As an application we construct, for each even integer $s\geq 2$, compact symplectic manifolds which are $s$-Lefschetz but not $(s+1)$-Lefschetz.Comment: 22 pages; many improvements from previous versio

Symplectic resolutions, Lefschetz property and formality

We introduce a method to resolve a symplectic orbifold into a smooth symplectic manifold. Then we study how the formality and the Lefschetz property of the symplectic resolution are compared with that of the symplectic orbifold. We also study the formality of the symplectic blow-up of a symplectic orbifold along symplectic submanifolds disjoint from the orbifold singularities. This allows us to construct the first example of a simply connected compact symplectic manifold of dimension 8 which satisfies the Lefschetz property but is not formal, therefore giving a counter-example to a conjecture of Babenko and Taimanov.Comment: 21 pages, no figure

Spin-harmonic structures and nilmanifolds

We introduce spin-harmonic structures, a class of geometric structures on Riemannian manifolds of low dimension which are defined by a harmonic unitary spinor. Such structures are related to SU(2) (dim=4,5), SU(3) (dim=6) and G_2 (dim=7) structures; in dimension 8, a spin-harmonic structure is equivalent to a balanced Spin(7) structure. As an application, we obtain examples of compact 8-manifolds endowed with non-integrable Spin(7) structures of balanced type.Comment: 34 pages, no figure