On symplectic fillings (Q1880620)

The paper proves several useful facts about symplectic fillings, mostly in the context of contact structures on 3-manifolds. The results discussed in the paper include, in particular, the fact that a weakly (resp. strongly) semi-fillable contact structure is weakly (resp. strongly) fillable, and that any symplectic 4-manifold with weakly or strongly convex boundary components can be embedded as a domain in a closed symplectic manifold. Both results are consequences of Theorem 1.1 proved in the paper. The author also considers the relationship between properties of the open book decomposition of a contact manifold and the topology of its symplectic fillings (Theorems 1.4 and 1.5). The paper includes a section (Section 2) recalling various notions of symplectic fillings of contact manifolds, and many references where interesting applications to the results of the paper can be found.