Gromov compactness for squiggly strip shrinking in pseudoholomorphic quilts (Q1783978)

The authors study families of pseudoholomorphic quilts in which the width of a strip, or annulus, shrinks to zero; there it is replaced by compact Lagrangian correspondences associated to the adjacent seams. The main result is a Gromov compactness theorem; a precise description of the singular quilt bubbling phenomena, figure eight bubbling and prediction of algebraic consequences are described. In particular it is shown that figure eight bubbles can be seen as a tool: fully embracing figure eight bubbles will yield a natural 2-categorical structure of compact symplectic manifolds. Proofs are based on width-independent elliptic estimates obtained in a previous paper of the first author [``Pseudoholomorphic quilts with figure eight singularity'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1410.3834}]. Moreover the first non trivial example of a general figure eight bubble is described in Appendix B (in collaboration with Felix Schmäschke).