Strongly fillable contact manifolds and \(J\)-holomorphic foliations (Q961476)

A contact 3-manifold \((M,\lambda)\) is strongly fillable if it is the boundary of a symplectic manifold \((W,\omega)\) and \(\text{ker}(\lambda)=\text{ker}(i_Y\omega)\), where \(Y\) is a vector field defined near \(M=\partial W\) and is pointing outward with \(L_Y\omega=\omega\). The filling is exact if \(Y\) is global, and it is Stein if \(\partial W\) is a level set of a proper plurisubharmonic function \(\varphi\) with \(Y=\text{grad\,}\varphi\). The paper investigates fillability under the existence of certain open book decompositions of \(M\) that lift to pseudoholomorphic foliations in its symplectization. It develops geometric applications of the author's recent analytic result on moduli of punctured curves with Morse-Bott asymptotic orbits in four-dimensional symplectic cobordisms. First, assume that \(M\) admits a planar open book decomposition, i.e., one with genus zero pages, that supports its contact structure. The paper proves that after possibly attaching a trivial symplectic cobordism to \(M\)'s strong filling this decomposition extends to a symplectic Lefschetz fibration stable under deformations of the symplectic structure. It follows that such \(M\) are strongly fillable if and only if they are Stein fillable. The planarity assumption is needed to apply a recent result of Abbas on lifting open books to symplectizations. Although the torus \(T^3\) with standard contact structure does not decompose into a planar open book, the author is able to use the same technique on a weaker version, which is a union of two open books with cylindrical pages. He demonstrates that all strong fillings of \(T^3\) with no exceptional spheres are symplectically deformation equivalent and diffeomorphic to \(T\times\mathbb D\) confirming a conjecture of Stipsicz. Moreover, exact fillings are even symplectomorphic to star-shaped domains in \(T^*T^2\). A step in the proof establishes that the compactly supported symplectomorphism group of \(T^*T^2\) is contractible. These results are similar in spirit to McDuff's classification of Stein fillings of the lens space \(L(p,1)\). On a different note, the author derives a new obstruction to strong fillability based on the existence of certain finite energy foliations on a 3-dimensional submanifold of \(M\) with Morse-Bott boundary. It is used to reprove, without involving gauge theory, a result of Gay that closed contact 3-manifolds with positive Giroux torsion are not strongly fillable. A similar argument also proves, for such manifolds, the Weinstein conjecture on the existence of periodic orbits.