Relative Thom Conjectures, symplectic and beyond

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hedden, Matthew, Raoux, Katherine
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866917121184759808
author Hedden, Matthew
Raoux, Katherine
author_facet Hedden, Matthew
Raoux, Katherine
contents We establish a criterion that ensures a bounded almost complex curve in a bounded almost complex 4-manifold minimizes genus amongst all smooth surfaces that share its homology class and the transverse link on its boundary. An immediate corollary affirms the relative symplectic Thom conjecture and, moreover, yields obstructions coming from knot Floer homology to a link bounding a symplectic surface in a symplectic filling. Our results are applicable to knots in manifolds equipped with plane fields that admit no symplectic fillings; for instance, we show that symplectic surfaces in a thickening of any contact 3-manifold with non-zero Ozsvath-Szabo invariant minimize slice genus for their boundary. We conjecture that this phenomenon occurs precisely when the contact structure is tight, which would imply that tightness can be viewed as a symplecto-geometric notion.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_03250
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Relative Thom Conjectures, symplectic and beyond
Hedden, Matthew
Raoux, Katherine
Geometric Topology
Symplectic Geometry
57K43, 57K33, 57K18, 57K41, 57K31, 57R17, 57K10, 57R58,
We establish a criterion that ensures a bounded almost complex curve in a bounded almost complex 4-manifold minimizes genus amongst all smooth surfaces that share its homology class and the transverse link on its boundary. An immediate corollary affirms the relative symplectic Thom conjecture and, moreover, yields obstructions coming from knot Floer homology to a link bounding a symplectic surface in a symplectic filling. Our results are applicable to knots in manifolds equipped with plane fields that admit no symplectic fillings; for instance, we show that symplectic surfaces in a thickening of any contact 3-manifold with non-zero Ozsvath-Szabo invariant minimize slice genus for their boundary. We conjecture that this phenomenon occurs precisely when the contact structure is tight, which would imply that tightness can be viewed as a symplecto-geometric notion.
title Relative Thom Conjectures, symplectic and beyond
topic Geometric Topology
Symplectic Geometry
57K43, 57K33, 57K18, 57K41, 57K31, 57R17, 57K10, 57R58,
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03250