USC Topology Seminar: Decompositions and diagrams of symplectic surfaces in Weinstein domains

Melissa Zhang, UC Davis Title: Decompositions and diagrams of symplectic surfaces in Weinstein domains Abstract: A closed 3-manifold can be diagrammatically encoded by a Heegaard diagram, which comes from a decomposition of the space into 1-handlebodies called a Heegaard splitting. Analogously, Gay and Kirby's trisections diagrammatically encode the decomposition of a smooth 4-manifold into three 1-handlebodies. More generally, Islambouli--Naylor multisections decompose 4-manifolds with boundary into n 1-handlebodies. Meier--Zupan's bridge trisections encode surfaces in these 4-manifolds. We …