Squared Dehn twists and deformed symplectic invariants (Q2146795)

The classical Dehn twist is a certain self-diffeomorphism of the annulus which is the identity map near the boundary and the antipodal map on the core circle. This transformation has a natural generalization to higher dimensions, sometimes called \textit{generalized Dehn twist} or \textit{Dehn-Siedel twist} or \textit{Picard-Lefschetz transformation}. The generalized Dehn twist can be implanted into a neighborhood of a Lagrangian sphere \(S\) of the sympectic maifold \((M^{2n}, \omega )\) and the resulting symplectomorphism \(\tau _S:M\rightarrow M\) is well-defined up to symplectic isotopies fixing the boundary. The paper under review, which is almost a book, studies the infinitesimal analogue of the fragility properties of \(\tau _S\) in the setting of a Liouville domain \((M^{4m}, \theta )\). The first main result, namely the Theorem 1.1, concerns with the case \(m=1\) and roughly states that, although \(\tau _S^2\) is not symplectically isotropic to the identity, it behaves like the identity in the presence of a twisting \(2\)-form. The higher version of the Theorem 1.1 is the Theorem 1.2 which involves the notion of \textit{bulk deformation} introduced by Fukaya-Oh-Ohta-Ono. The main applications of these results deal with the study of subflexible Weinstein domains, which are examples of exotic symplectic manifolds whose ordinary symplectic cohomology vanishes. We point out that in the paragraph 4.2 a bulk deformed version of symplectic cohomology is defined in order to distinguish further subflexible examples for which no two-dimensional cohomology class suffices.