This is an exposition of the Donaldson geometric flow on the space of symplectic forms on a closed smooth four-manifold, representing a fixed cohomology class. The original work appeared in [1].
We introduce a method of geometric quantization for compact $b$-symplectic manifolds in terms of the index of an Atiyah-Patodi-Singer (APS) boundary value problem. We show further that b-symplectic manifolds have canonical Spin-c structures in the us
ual sense, and that the APS index above coincides with the index of the Spin-c Dirac operator. We show that if the manifold is endowed with a Hamiltonian action of a compact connected Lie group with non-zero modular weights, then this method satisfies the Guillemin-Sternberg ``quantization commutes with reduction property. In particular our quantization coincides with the formal quantization defined by Guillemin, Miranda and Weitsman, providing a positive answer to a question posed in their paper.
A symplectic semitoric manifold is a symplectic $4$-manifold endowed with a Hamiltonian $(S^1 times mathbb{R})$-action satisfying certain conditions. The goal of this paper is to construct a new symplectic invariant of symplectic semitoric manifolds,
the helix, and give applications. The helix is a symplectic analogue of the fan of a nonsingular complete toric variety in algebraic geometry, that takes into account the effects of the monodromy near focus-focus singularities. We give two applications of the helix: first, we use it to give a classification of the minimal models of symplectic semitoric manifolds, where minimal is in the sense of not admitting any blowdowns. The second application is an extension to the compact case of a well known result of V~{u} Ngoc about the constraints posed on a symplectic semitoric manifold by the existence of focus-focus singularities. The helix permits to translate a symplectic geometric problem into an algebraic problem, and the paper describes a method to solve this type of algebraic problem.
We analyze two different fibrations of a link complement M constructed by McMullen-Taubes, and studied further by Vidussi. These examples lead to inequivalent symplectic forms on a 4-manifold X = S x M, which can be distinguished by the dimension of
the primitive cohomologies of differential forms. We provide a general algorithm for computing the monodromies of the fibrations explicitly, which are needed to determine the primitive cohomologies. We also investigate a similar phenomenon coming from fibrations of a class of graph links, whose primitive cohomology provides information about the fibration structure.
We introduce a class of Weinstein domains which are sublevel sets of flexible Weinstein manifolds but are not themselves flexible. These manifolds exhibit rather subtle behavior with respect to both holomorphic curve invariants and symplectic flexibi
lity. We construct a large class of examples and prove that every flexible Weinstein manifold can be Weinstein homotoped to have a nonflexible sublevel set.