OPEN BOOKS AND THE WEINSTEIN CONJECTURE

Abstract
We show the existence of a contractible periodic Reeb orbit for any contact structure supported by an open book whose binding can be realized as a hypersurface of restricted contact type in a subcritical Stein manifold. A key ingredient in the proof is a higher dimensional version of Eliashberg's theorem about symplectic cobordisms from a contact manifold to a symplectic fibration.