English

Contact surgery numbers of projective spaces

Geometric Topology 2026-02-10 v2 Symplectic Geometry

Abstract

We classify all contact projective spaces with contact surgery number one. In particular, this implies that there exist infinitely many non-isotopic contact structures on the real projective 3-space which cannot be obtained by a single rational contact surgery from the standard tight contact 3-sphere. Large parts of our proofs deal with a detailed analysis of Gompf's Γ\Gamma-invariant of tangential 2-plane fields on 3-manifolds. From our main result we also deduce that the Γ\Gamma-invariant of a tangential 2-plane field on the real projective 3-space only depends on its d3d_3-invariant.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.05032,
  title  = {Contact surgery numbers of projective spaces},
  author = {Marc Kegel and Monika Yadav},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.05032},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

23 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables. V2: Minor corrections. To appear in Mediterranean Journal of Mathematics