Pinwheels in symplectic rational and ruled surfaces and non-squeezing of rational homology balls

Abstract

We use almost toric fibrations and the symplectic rational blow-up to determine when certain Lagrangian pinwheels, which we call liminal, embed in symplectic rational and ruled surfaces. The case of $L_{2,1}$-pinwheels, namely Lagrangian $\mathbb{R}P^2$'s, answers a question of Kronheimer in the negative, exhibiting a symplectic non-spin $4$-manifold that does not carry a Lagrangian $\mathbb{R}P^2$. In addition, we provide applications to symplectic embeddings of rational homology balls. In particular, we generalize Gromov's classical non-squeezing theorem by proving that a rational homology ball $B_{n,1}(1)$ embeds into the rational homology cylinder $B_{n,1}(\alpha,\infty)$ if and only if $\alpha\geq 1$. Along the way, we prove various properties of Lagrangian pinwheels of independent interest, such as describing their homological complement, providing a short proof that performing a symplectic rational blow-up of a Lagrangian pinwheel in a positive symplectic rational manifold yields a symplectic manifold which is also rational, and showing a self-intersection formula for Lagrangian pinwheels.