Paper detail

Altering symplectic manifolds by homologous recombination

We use symplectic cohomology to study the non-uniqueness of symplectic structures on the smooth manifolds underlying affine varieties. Starting with a Lefschetz fibration on such a variety and a finite set of primes, the main new tool is a method, which we call homologous recombination, for constructing a Lefschetz fibration whose total space is smoothly equivalent to the original variety, but for which symplectic cohomology with coefficients in the given set of primes vanishes (there is also a simpler version that kills symplectic cohomology completely). Rather than relying on a geometric analysis of periodic orbits of a flow, the computation of symplectic cohomology depends on describing the Fukaya category associated to the new fibration. As a consequence of this and a result of McLean we prove, for example, that an affine variety of real dimension greater than 4 supports infinitely many different (Wein)stein structures of finite type, and, assuming a mild cohomological condition, uncountably many different ones of infinite type. In addition, we introduce a notion of complexity which measures the number of handle attachments required to construct a given Weinstein manifold, and prove that, in dimensions greater than or equal to 12, one may ensure that the infinitely many different Weinstein manifolds smoothly equivalent to a given algebraic variety have bounded complexity.