Families of contact 3-manifolds with arbitrarily large Stein fillings

Abstract

We show that there are vast families of contact 3-manifolds each member of which admits infinitely many Stein fillings with arbitrarily big euler characteristics and arbitrarily small signatures ---which disproves a conjecture of Stipsicz and Ozbagci. To produce our examples, we set a framework which generalizes the construction of Stein structures on allowable Lefschetz fibrations over the 2-disk to those over any orientable base surface, along with the construction of contact structures via open books on 3-manifolds to spinal open books introduced in [24].