Fillability obstructions for high-dimensional confoliations

TL;DR

This paper extends fillability obstructions from 3-dimensional contact topology to higher-dimensional confoliations, introducing new invariants and demonstrating non-fillability results for certain product manifolds.

Contribution

It generalizes the bordered Legendrian open book obstruction to confoliations with symplectic data and applies this to show non-fillability of specific high-dimensional manifolds.

Findings

Generalization of fillability obstructions to higher dimensions

Non-fillability of products of overtwisted contact manifolds with certain symplectic manifolds

New definitions of approximation and deformation of confoliations

Abstract

In this paper, we study confoliations in dimensions higher than three mostly from the perspective of symplectic fillability. Our main result is that Massot-Niederkr\"uger-Wendl's bordered Legendrian open book, an object that obstructs the weak symplectic fillability of contact manifolds, admits a generalization for confoliations equipped with symplectic data. Applications include the non-fillability of the product of an overtwisted contact manifold and a class of symplectic manifolds, and the fact that Bourgeois contact structures associated with overtwisted contact manifolds admit no weak symplectic fillings for which the symplectic structure restricts at the boundary to a positive generator of the second cohomology of the torus factor. In addition, along the lines of the original 3-dimensional work of Eliashberg and Thurston, we give a new definition of approximation and deformation of confoliations by contact structures and describe some natural examples.