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 -invariant of tangential 2-plane fields on 3-manifolds. From our main result we also deduce that the -invariant of a tangential 2-plane field on the real projective 3-space only depends on its -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