Ruled 4-manifolds and isotopies of symplectic surfaces (Q974666)

A symplectic manifold is a smooth manifold \(M\) equipped with a closed non degenerate skew-symmetric form \(\omega\) called the symplectic form. A symplectic 4-manifold \((M,\omega)\) is called ruled if it is a fibration over a Riemann surface \(\Sigma\) with fiber \(S^2.\) The authors study symplectic surfaces in ruled symplectic 4-manifolds which are disjoint from a given symplectic section and ask whether other symplectic surfaces in some neighborhood \(U\) of \(\Sigma\) are smoothly or symplectically isotopic to \(\Sigma\). Here we quote only Corollary 8.3 of the paper since other statements need further descriptions. It says: Let \((M,\omega)\) be a symplectic 4-manifold and let \(\Sigma\subset M\) be an embedded symplectic surface. Then there is an (arbitrarily small) neighborhood \(U\) of \(\Sigma\) (e.g. standard symplectic disk bundle over \(\Sigma\)) so that the set \(\mathcal S(U,\omega)\) of embedded symplectic surfaces in \(U\) homologous to \(\Sigma\) is weakly contractible. As a consequence we have that in any symplectic 4-manifold, two homologous symplectic surfaces which are \(C^0\) close must be Hamiltonian isotopic.