English

Surgery diagrams for contact 3-manifolds

Symplectic Geometry 2007-05-23 v1 Geometric Topology

Abstract

In two previous papers, the two first-named authors introduced a notion of contact r-surgery along Legendrian knots in contact 3-manifolds. They also showed how (at least in principle) to convert any contact r-surgery into a sequence of contact plus or minus 1 surgeries, and used this to prove that any (closed) contact 3-manifold can be obtained from the standard contact structure on the 3-sphere by a sequence of such surgeries. In the present paper, we give a shorter proof of that result and a more explicit algorithm for turning a contact r-surgery into plus or minus 1 surgeries. We use this to give explicit surgery diagrams for all contact structures on the 3-sphere and S^1\times S^2, as well as all overtwisted contact structures on arbitrary closed, orientable 3-manifolds. This amounts to a new proof of the Lutz-Martinet theorem that each homotopy class of 2-plane fields on such a manifold is represented by a contact structure.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.math/0307237,
  title  = {Surgery diagrams for contact 3-manifolds},
  author = {Fan Ding and Hansjörg Geiges and András I. Stipsicz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:math/0307237},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

32 pages, 14 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-22T16:56:21.383Z