Symplectormophism groups of non-compact manifolds, orbifold balls, and a space of Lagrangians (Q308007)

The seminal work on pseudo holomorphic curves in symplectic manifolds by \textit{M. Gromov} [Invent. Math. 82, 307--347 (1985; Zbl 0592.53025)] has inspired much research on the symplectomorphism groups of closed 4-manifolds. In the present paper, the authors make an interesting study of such groups for the non-compact symplectic 4-manifolds obtained by symplectification of the classical 3-dimensional Lens spaces \(M=L(n,1)\). The Lens space \(L(n,1)\) inherits a natural contact one-form from the standard contact structure on the 3-sphere \(S^3\). From this there is a standard way of obtaining a non-compact symplectic 4-manifold \(sL(n,1)\). The compactly supported symplectomorphism group of \(sL(n,1)\), denoted \(\text{Symp}_c(sL(n,1))\), equipped with the \(C^{\infty}\)-topology, has a rich topology. In a main theorem, the authors prove that \(\text{Symp}_c(sL(n,1))\) has countably many components, each being weakly homotopy equivalent to the based loop space of \(SU(2)\). They furthermore show that there is a natural map from the based loop group of the contact isometry group of \(L(n,1)\) to \(\text{Symp}_c(sL(n,1))\), which induces the weak homotopy equivalence.