Title: Bounds on Embeddings of Rational homology Balls in Symplectic 4-manifolds
Speaker: Tatyana Khodorovskiy, Hunter College of CUNY
Date: Thursday, March 7, 2013
Time: 11:30am – 12:30pm
Place: Lecture Hall 102, Simons Center
Abstract: The rational blow-down procedure for smooth 4-manifolds was defined in 1998 by Fintushel and Stern, which is a generalization of the standard blow-down operation, where a negative definite linear plumbing manifold C_n is replaced with a rational homology ball B_n, n>1. In this talk, we will discuss the inverse of this procedure, the rational blow-up, in the symplectic category. We will address the question of when a symplectic 4-manifold can be rationally blown up. Moreover, we will present a result which illustrates that for a symplectic 4-manifold, there is a bound on n, above which we can no longer symplectically embed a rational homology ball B_n, and hence provide an obstruction to the rational blow-up procedure in the symplectic category.