The topology of Stein fillable manifolds in high dimensions II

Abstract

We continue our study of contact structures on manifolds of dimension at least five using complex surgery theory. We show that in each dimension 2q+1 > 3 there are 'maximal' almost contact manifolds to which there is a Stein cobordism from any other (2q+1)-dimensional contact manifold. We show that the product M x S^2 admits a weakly fillable contact structure provided M admits a weak symplectic filling. We also study the connection between Stein fillability and connected sums: we give examples of almost contact manifolds for which the connected sum is Stein fillable, while the components are not. Concerning obstructions to Stein fillings, we show that the (8k-1)-dimensional sphere has an almost contact structure which is not Stein fillable once k > 1. As a consequence we deduce that any highly connected almost contact (8k-1)-manifold (with k > 1) admits an almost contact structure which is not Stein fillable. The proofs rely on a new number-theoretic result about Bernoulli numbers.