Construction of symplectic 4-manifolds and Lefschetz fibrations via Luttinger surgery

Luttinger surgery is a certain type of Dehn surgery along a Lagrangian torus in a symplectic 4-manifold. The surgery was introduced by Karl Luttinger in 1995, who used it to study Lagrangian tori in R^4. Luttinger’s surgery has been very effective tool recently for constructing exotic smooth and symplectic structures on 4-manifolds. In this talk, using Luttinger surgery, I will present the constructions of smallest known closed exotic simply connected symplectic 4-manifolds and exotic Lefschetz fibrations over 2-sphere whose total spaces have arbitrary finitely presented group G as the fundamental group. If time permits, we will also discuss some applications to the geography of symplectic 4-manifolds and Lefschetz fibrations. Part of these are (separate) joint works with B. Doug Park, Burak Ozbagci, and Naoyuki Monden.