A note on embeddings of 3-manifolds in symplectic 4-manifolds

Abstract

We show that any closed oriented 3-manifold can be topologically embedded in some simply-connected closed symplectic 4-manifold, and that it can be made a smooth embedding after one stabilization. As a corollary of the proof we show that the homology cobordism group is generated by Stein fillable 3-manifolds. We also find obstructions on smooth embeddings: there exists 3-manifolds which cannot smoothly embed in a way that appropriately respect orientations in any symplectic manifold with weakly convex boundary. This embedding obstruction can also be used to detect exotic smooth structures on 4-manifolds.