Dehn twist exact sequences through Lagrangian cobordism

This paper introduces a new Lagrangian surgery construction that generalizes Lalonde–Sikorav and Polterovich’s well-known construction, and combines this with Biran and Cornea’s Lagrangian cobordism formalism. With these techniques, we build a framework which both recovers several known long exact sequences (Seidel’s exact sequence, including the fixed point version and Wehrheim and Woodward’s family version) in symplectic geometry in a uniform way, and yields a partial answer to a long-term open conjecture due to Huybrechts and Thomas; this also involved a new observation which relates projective twists with surgeries.

Quotient and blow-up of automorphisms of graphs of groups

In this paper, we study the quotient and “blow-up” of graph-of-groups [Formula: see text] and of their automorphisms [Formula: see text]. We show that the existence of such a blow-up of any [Formula: see text], relative to a given family of “local” graph-of-groups isomorphisms [Formula: see text] depends crucially on the [Formula: see text]-conjugacy class of the correction term [Formula: see text] for any edge [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text]-conjugacy is a new but natural concept introduced here. As an application, we obtain a criterion as to whether a partial Dehn twist can be blown up relative to local Dehn twists, to give an actual Dehn twist. The results of this paper are also used crucially in the follow-up papers [Lustig and Ye, Normal form and parabolic dynamics for quadratically growing automorphisms of free groups, arXiv:1705.04110v2; Ye, Partial Dehn twists of free groups relative to local Dehn twists — A dichotomy, arXiv:1605.04479 ; When is a polynomially growing automorphism of [Formula: see text] geometric, arXiv:1605.07390 ].

Centralisers of Dehn twist automorphisms of free groups

We refine Cohen and Lustig's description of centralisers of Dehn twists of free groups. We show that the centraliser of a Dehn twist of a free group has a subgroup of finite index that has a finite classifying space. We describe an algorithm to find a presentation of the centraliser. We use this algorithm to give an explicit presentation for the centraliser of a Nielsen automorphism in Aut(Fn). This gives restrictions to actions of Aut(Fn) on CAT(0) spaces.

Overtwisted discs in planar open books

Using open book foliations we show that an overtwisted disc in a planar open book can be put in a topologically nice position. As a corollary, we prove that a planar open book whose fractional Dehn twist coefficients greater than one for all the boundary components supports a tight contact structure.