Subcritical contact surgeries and the topology of symplectic fillings

Abstract: By a result of Eliashberg, every symplectic filling of a three-dimensional contact connected sum is obtained by performing a boundary connected sum on another symplectic filling. We prove a partial generalization of this result for subcritical contact surgeries in higher dimensions: given any contact manifold that arises from another contact manifold by subcritical surgery, its belt sphere is null-bordant in the oriented bordism group $\Omega SO^*(W)$ of any symplectically aspherical filling $W$, and in dimension five, it will even be nullhomotopic. More generally, if the filling is not aspherical but is semipositive, then the belt sphere will be trivial in $H^*(W)$. Using the same methods, we show that the contact connected sum decomposition for tight contact structures in dimension three does not extend to higher dimensions: in particular, we exhibit connected sums of manifolds of dimension at least five with Stein fillable contact structures that do not arise as contact connected sums. The proofs are based on holomorphic disk-filling techniques, with families of Legendrian open books (so-called "Lobs") as boundary conditions.