Circle actions on symplectic four-manifolds

Abstract

We complete the classification of Hamiltonian torus and circle actions on symplectic four-dimensional manifolds. Following work of Delzant and Karshon, Hamiltonian circle and 2-torus actions on any fixed simply connected symplectic four-manifold were characterized by Karshon, Kessler and Pinsonnault. What remains is to study the case of Hamiltonian actions on blowups of S^2-bundles over a Riemann surface of positive genus. These do not admit 2-torus actions. In this paper, we characterize Hamiltonian circle actions on them. We then derive combinatorial results on the existence and counting of these actions. As a by-product, we provide an algorithm that determines the g-reduced form of a blowup form. Our work is a combination of soft equivariant and combinatorial techniques, using the momentum map and related data, with hard holomorphic techniques, including Gromov-Witten invariants.