Subcritical contact surgeries and the topology of symplectic fillings (Q502553)

The way of constructing contact manifolds as boundaries of symplectic \(2n\)-manifolds by attaching handles of index smaller or equal than \(n\) is quite old. It gets back to the works of \textit{Y. Eliashberg} [Int. J. Math. 1, No. 1, 29--46 (1990; Zbl 0699.58002)] and \textit{A. Weinstein} [Hokkaido Math. J. 20, No. 2, 241--251 (1991; Zbl 0737.57012)]. In this context, the handles of index smaller than \(n\) (subcritical handles) play a significant role. The main point of the paper under review is to generalize to high dimensions the result of Eliashberg which states that every symplectic filling of a three-dimensional contact connected sum comes as a result of a boundary connected sum on another symplectic filling. The authors prove that on a contact manifold obtained by performing a subcritical contact surgery on another contact manifold its belt sphere vanishes in the oriented bordism group of any symplectically aspherical symplectic filling (and in the \(5\)-dimensional case it is even nullhomotopic). For a semipositive filling, the belt sphere is trivial in the homology of the filling. In addition, the authors describe high-dimensional connected sums (dimension \(\geq 5\)) with Stein fillable contact structures that do not arise as contact connected sums. The idea of proof is a higher-dimensional analogue of the disk-filling method used in the proof of Eliashberg's result in dimension three. This way works if one can find a suitable submanifold to serve as a boundary condition for holomorphic disks. The object used in this case is a Legendrian open book (Lob, invented by the second author and \textit{A. Rechtman} [J. Topol. Anal. 3, No. 4, 405--421 (2011; Zbl 1241.53064)]).