English

A Legendrian surgery presentation of contact 3-manifolds

Symplectic Geometry 2009-11-07 v2 Geometric Topology

Abstract

We prove that every closed, connected contact 3-manifold can be obtained from the 3-sphere with its standard contact structure by contact surgery of coefficient plus or minus 1 along a Legendrian link. As a corollary, we derive a result of Etnyre and Honda about symplectic cobordisms (in slightly stronger form).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.math/0107045,
  title  = {A Legendrian surgery presentation of contact 3-manifolds},
  author = {Fan Ding and Hansjörg Geiges},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:math/0107045},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

18 pages, Section 3 and three figures added. To appear in Math. Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc