Milnor fibers and symplectic fillings of quotient surface singularities (Q1744571)

The article deals with the comparison of symplectic fillings and Milnor fibers of quotient complex surface singularities. As any Milnor fiber corresponding to a smoothing (and, in turn, to an irreducible component of the reduced versal deformation space) provides a Stein filling (and thus, a minimal symplectic filling) of the link of the singularity with the Milnor fillable contact structure, it is natural to ask whether every minimal symplectic filling can be obtained as a Milnor fiber, and how can we identify given Milnor fibers on the list of possible symplectic fillings. A full list of possible minimal symplectic fillings was given in [\textit{P. Lisca}, Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 360, No. 2, 765--799 (2008; Zbl 1137.57026)] for cyclic quotient and in [\textit{M. Bhupal} and \textit{K. Ono}, Nagoya Math. J. 207, 1--45 (2012; Zbl 1258.53088)] for non-cyclic quotient singularities. The first main result of the paper is that the minimal symplectic fillings of non-cyclic quotient singularities provided by Bhupal and Ono in [Zbl 1258.53088] are different up to diffeomorphism (after removing some duplicates). Moreover, the homeomorphism types are also the same if the diffeomorphism types are the same. (The analogous statement for cyclic quotient singularities was obtained by Lisca using similar strategy in [Zbl 1137.57026].) The second main results identifies every Milnor fiber on the list of symplectic fillings using the minimal model program for 3-folds (divisorial contractions and flips). This construction of an explicit correspondence leads to the third result: ``The Milnor fibers associated to irreducible components of the reduced semi-universal deformation space of a quotient surface singularity are non-diffeomorphic to each other'' (Theorem 10.5 in the current paper). The fourth main result deals with the opposite correspondence: it turns out that every minimal symplectic filling of a quotient surface singularity can be realized as a Milnor fiber. (This was proved in [\textit{H. Ohta} and \textit{K. Ono}, J. Differ. Geom. 69, No. 1, 1--42 (2005; Zbl 1085.53079)] for ADE and in [\textit{A. Némethi} and \textit{P. Popescu-Pampu}, Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. (3) 101, No. 2, 554--588 (2010; Zbl 1204.32020)] for cyclic quotient singularities.) The proof uses the negative weight smoothing technique from [\textit{H. Pinkham}, Math. Ann. 232, 65--84 (1978; Zbl 0351.14004)]. In fact, it is established that ``any minimal symplectic filling of a quotient surface singularity is obtained by a sequence of rational blow-downs from its unique maximal resolution'' (Theorem 11.3 in the current paper).