Open book decompositions and stable Hamiltonian structures (Q967471)

An open book on a contact \(3\)-manifold \(M\) is a surface fibration over the circle with the total space \(M\backslash B\), where \(B\) is a link in \(M\) called binding. The fibers are called pages and an open book is planar if all of its pages have genus zero. Pages of an open book are transverse to the Reeb vector field of the contact form, a property shared by projections of embedded pseudoholomorphic curves in the symplectization of \(M\) with a compatible almost complex structure. The main result of this paper is that any planar open book can be isotoped into a projection of a smooth family of embedded pseudoholomorphic curves in the symplectization, a so-called holomorphic open book. The result has already been used (among other instances) in Abbas-Cieliebak-Hofer's proof of the Weinstein conjecture for \(3\)-manifolds with planar open book structure, but they only sketched its proof without much detail. The paper's construction is based on a different idea. Namely, the vertical distribution on a mapping torus is extended to a confoliation on \(M\), and an almost complex structure is chosen to be compatible with a stable Hamiltonian structure rather than the symplectic form at first. Planarity is then required for a perturbation argument that completes the proof.