Overtwisted open books from sobering arcs (Q2571380)

An open book decomposition of a \(3\)-manifold is compatible with the unique contact structure. The author introduces a notion of a sobering arc in an open book and shows that if a sobering exists then the contact structure compatible with the open book is overtwisted. There are open books compatible with an overtwisted contact structure that do not have sobering arcs. The author shows that every such open book is stably equivalent (by Murasugi sum with positive Hopf bands) to an open book with a sobering arc. Using these results the author constructs an example of a positive symplectic configuration graph \(G\) that gives rise to an open book decomposition compatible with an overtwisted contact structure. Thus the symplectic configuration with graph \(G\) can not embed into a closed symplectic \(4\)-manifold. This answers Question 2.5 of \textit{D.~Gay} [Algebr. Geom. Topol. 3, 569--586 (2003; Zbl 1035.57015)].