Singular Lefschetz pencils (Q2388843)

In the paper under review the authors consider structures analogous to symplectic Lefschetz pencils in the context of a closed \(4\)-manifold equipped with a ``near-symplectic'' structure. Their main result asserts that, up to blowups, every near-symplectic \(4\)-manifold \((X,\omega)\) can be decomposed into: two symplectic Lefschetz fibrations over discs; and a fibre bundle over \(S^1\) which relates the boundaries of the Lefschetz fibrations to each other via a sequence of fiberwise bundle additions taking place in a neighborhood of the zero set of the \(2\)-form \(\omega\). Conversely, from such a decomposition one can recover a near-symplectic structure.