Iterated planar contact manifolds

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, April 9, 2018 - 2:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Bahar Acu – Northwestern University
Organizer
John Etnyre

Planar contact manifolds have been intensively studied to understand several aspects of 3-dimensional contact geometry. In this talk, we define "iterated planar contact manifolds", a higher-dimensional analog of planar contact manifolds, by using topological tools such as "open book decompositions" and "Lefschetz fibrations”. We provide some history on existing low-dimensional results regarding Reeb dynamics, symplectic fillings/caps of contact manifolds and explain some generalization of those results to higher dimensions via iterated planar structure. This is partly based on joint work in progress with J. Etnyre and B. Ozbagci.