English

The space of tight contact structures on ${\mathbb R}^3$ is contractible

Symplectic Geometry 2021-08-24 v1 Geometric Topology

Abstract

It was proven in the first author's paper "Contact 3-manifolds twenty years since J. Martinet's work" (Ann. Inst. Fourier, 42(1992), 165--192) that any tight contact structure on the 3-sphere is diffeomorphic to the standard one. It was also claimed there without a proof that similar methods could be used to prove a multi-parametric version: the space of tight contact structures on S3S^3, fixed at a point, is contractible. We prove this result in the current paper.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2108.09452,
  title  = {The space of tight contact structures on ${\mathbb R}^3$ is contractible},
  author = {Yakov Eliashberg and Nikolai Mishachev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.09452},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

52 pages, 32 figures