An elementary stabilization of a Legendrian knot L in the spherical cotangent bundle ST*M of a surface M is a surgery that results in attaching a handle to M along two discs away from the image in M of the projection of the knot L. A virtual Legendrian isotopy is a composition of stabilizations, destabilizations and Legendrian isotopies. A class of virtual Legendrian isotopy is called a virtual Legendrian knot. In contrast to Legendrian knots, virtual Legendrian knots enjoy the...

We prove several results on weak symplectic fillings of contact $3$-manifolds, including: (1) Every weak filling of any planar contact manifold can be deformed to a blow up of a Stein filling. (2) Contact manifolds that have fully separating planar torsion are not weakly fillable—this gives many new examples of contact manifolds without Giroux torsion that have no weak fillings. (3) Weak fillability is preserved under splicing of contact manifolds along symplectic pre-Lagrangian tori—this gives many...