Spinal open books and symplectic fillings with exotic fibers

Abstract: Spinal open book decompositions provide a natural generalization of open book decompositions. We show that any minimal symplectic filling of a contact 3-manifold supported by a planar spinal open book is deformation equivalent to the complement of a positive multisection in a bordered Lefschetz fibration, which generalizes a result of Wendl. Along the way, we give an explicit local model for a non-compactly supported singularity in a generalized version of bordered Lefschetz fibrations, given by pseudoholomorphic foliations associated to the spinal open books. This provides new tools to classify symplectic fillings of a contact 3-manifold that is not supported by an amenable spinal open book, by studying monodromy factorizations in the newly defined spinal mapping class group. As an application, we complete the classification of strong fillings of all parabolic torus bundles, and make progress towards classifying symplectic fillings of contact 3-manifolds supported by non-planar open books.