Maximal contact and symplectic structures

Abstract

We introduce a procedure for gluing Weinstein domains along Weinstein subdomains. By gluing along flexible subdomains, we show that any finite collection of high-dimensional Weinstein domains with the same topology are Weinstein subdomains of a `maximal' Weinstein domain also with the same topology. As an application, we produce exotic cotangent bundles containing many closed regular Lagrangians that are formally Lagrangian isotopic but not Hamiltonian isotopic and also give a new construction of exotic Weinstein structures on Euclidean space. We describe a similar construction in the contact setting which we use to produce `maximal' contact structures and extend several existing results in low-dimensional contact geometry to high-dimensions. We prove that all contact manifolds have symplectic caps, introduce a general procedure for producing contact manifolds with many Weinstein fillings, and give a new proof of the existence of codimension two contact embeddings.