Generalized symplectic rational blowdowns (Q5943425)

The rational blowdown surgery is to remove a neighborhood of a linear chain of embedded spheres whose boundary is the lense space \(L(n^2,n-1)\), \(n \geq 2\), and replace it with a rational ball with boundary \(L(n^2,n-1)\). Fintushel and Stern use the rational blowdown surgery on smooth 4-manifolds to obtain an infinite family of exotic \(K3\) surfaces which are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to a degree 4 complex surface in \(\mathbb{C}\mathbb{P}^3\), all admit symplectic structures. If \(n, m \geq 1\) and relatively prime, the lens spaces \(L(n^2,nm-1)\) bound rational balls \(B_{m.n}\). We can define a broader class of rational blowdown, called generalized rational blowndown. The author shows that the generalized rational blowdown of a symplectic 4-manifold along symplectic spheres admits a symplectic structure induced from the symplectic structures on \(M\) and \(B_{m.n}\) which is considered as the total space of a singular Lagrangian fibration.