Poisson structures on smooth 4-manifolds (Q887146)

The paper under review is concerned with the existence of Poisson structures on smooth, oriented 4-manifolds, which are ``as regular as possible''. It is well-known that every oriented 2-manifold admits a symplectic, and hence a Poisson structure. Closed oriented 3-manifolds were shown in [\textit{A. Ibort} and \textit{D. Martínez Torres}, J. Symplectic Geom. 2, No. 1, 83--107 (2003; Zbl 1063.53082)] to admit regular rank 2 Poisson structures. For 4-manifolds, only the symplectic ones can admit regular rank 4 Poisson structures. The description of such structures in terms of Lefschetz pencils goes back to Donaldson. In this paper the authors make use of this idea in order to show that on a closed, oriented 4-manifold there exist plenty of Poisson structures which have constant rank 2 outside a small singular set. In particular, their result is: (Theorem 1.1 at the introduction) Let \(X\) be a closed oriented smooth 4-manifold. Then on each homotopy class of maps from \(X\) to the 2-sphere there exists a complete Poisson structure of rank 2 on \(X\) whose associated Poisson bivector vanishes only on a finite collection of circles and isolated points. Moreover, explicit local expressions are given for these Poisson structures in neighborhoods of the singularities.