Symplectic, Poisson, and Contact Geometry on Scattering Manifolds

We introduce scattering-symplectic manifolds, manifolds with a type of minimally degenerate Poisson structure that is not too restrictive so as to have a large class of examples, yet restrictive enough for standard Poisson invariants to be computable. This paper will demonstrate the potential of the scattering symplectic setting. In particular, we construct scattering-symplectic spheres and scattering symplectic gluings between strong convex symplectic fillings of a contact manifold. By giving an explicit computation of the Poisson cohomology of a scattering symplectic manifold, we introduce a new method of computing Poisson cohomology and apply it to b-symplectic manifolds.