English

Contact handle decompositions

Geometric Topology 2012-06-13 v1

Abstract

We review Giroux's contact handles and contact handle attachments in dimension three and show that a bypass attachment consists of a pair of contact 1 and 2-handles. As an application we describe explicit contact handle decompositions of infinitely many pairwise non-isotopic overtwisted 3-spheres. We also give an alternative proof of the fact that every compact contact 3-manifold (closed or with convex boundary) admits a contact handle decomposition, which is a result originally due to Giroux.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0901.4671,
  title  = {Contact handle decompositions},
  author = {Burak Ozbagci},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0901.4671},
  year   = {2012}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T12:05:55.230Z