Toric structures on near-symplectic 4-manifolds (Q1024255)

A near-symplectic structure on a four dimensional manifold is a differential two-form that is symplectic on the complement of a one dimensional submanifold on which it vanishes with some transversality conditions. Such a structure exists if a manifold has a second cohomology class with nonzero square. Modern techniques of four dimensional topology can be applied to near-symplectic manifolds. The authors investigate near-symplectic manifolds equipped with a singular Lagrangian fibration defined locally by an effective Hamiltonian torus action. They provide a characterisation of such structures in terms of a singular affine structure on the base. They prove several theorems in the paper. An example is the following: Every smooth effective torus action on a simply connected 4-manifold \(X\) with \(b_2^+(X)>0\) is Hamiltonian with respect to some near-symplectic structure. Furthermore, the vanishing locus for any such near-symplectic structure must have exactly \(b_2^+(X) - 1\) components.