On the topology of fillings of contact manifolds and applications.
On the topology of fillings of contact manifolds and applications.
The aim of this paper is to address the following question: given a contact manifold $(\Sigma, \xi)$, what can be said about the aspherical symplectic manifolds $(W, \omega)$ bounded by $(\Sigma, \xi)$ ? We first extend a theorem of Eliashberg, Floer and McDuff to prove that under suitable assumptions the …