Full Ellipsoid Embeddings and Toric Mutations

Abstract

This article introduces a new method to construct volume-filling symplectic embeddings of 4-dimensional ellipsoids by employing polytope mutations in toric and almost-toric varieties. The construction uniformly recovers the full sequences for the Fibonacci Staircase of McDuff-Schlenk, the Pell Staircase of Frenkel-Muller and the Cristofaro-Gardiner-Kleinman's Staircase, and adds new infinite sequences of ellipsoid embeddings. In addition, we initiate the study of symplectic tropical curves for almost-toric fibrations and emphasize the connection to quiver combinatorics.