Related papers: On Transverse Knots and Branched Covers

An important class of contact 3--manifolds are those that arise as links of rational surface singularities with reduced fundamental cycle. We explicitly describe symplectic caps (concave fillings) of such contact 3--manifolds. As an…

For a closed 3-manifold $M$ in a certain class, we give a presentation of the cellular chain complex of the universal cover of $M$. The class includes all surface bundles, some surgeries of knots in $S^3$, some cyclic branched cover of…

A complex contact threefold is a threefold with a two-dimensional non-integrable holomorphic distribution. A contact curve on a contact threefold is an integrable curve of the distribution. This work was inspired by two papers of Bryant, in…

Prime power fold cyclic branched covers along smoothly slice knots all bound rational homology balls. This phenomenon, however, does not characterize slice knots. In this paper, we give a new construction of non-slice knots that have the…

We prove a neighbourhood theorem for arbitrary knots in contact 3-manifolds. As an application we show that two topologically isotopic Legendrian knots in a contact 3-manifold become Legendrian isotopic after suitable stabilisations.

If a closed 3-manifold M supports a closed, nonsingular, irrational 1-form which linearly deforms into contact forms, then M supports a K-contact form. On the 3-torus, a closed nonsingular 1-form deforms linearly into contact forms if and…

According to Giroux, contact manifolds can be described as open books whose pages are Stein manifolds. For 5-dimensional contact manifolds the pages are Stein surfaces, which permit a description via Kirby diagrams. We introduce handle…

We discuss an "extrinsic" property of knots in a 3-subspace of the 3-sphere $S^3$ to characterize how the subspace is embedded in $S^3$. Specifically, we show that every knot in a subspace of the 3-sphere is transient if and only if the…

A branched covering surface-knot is a surface-knot in the form of a branched covering over an oriented surface-knot $F$, where we include the case when the covering has no branch points. A branched covering surface-knot is presented by a…

We present two examples of strongly invertible L-space knots whose surgeries are never the double branched cover of a Khovanov thin link in the 3-sphere. Consequently, these knots provide counterexamples to a conjectural characterization of…

We find a self-linking number formula for a given null-homologous transverse link in a contact manifold that is compatible with either an annulus or a pair of pants open book decomposition. It extends Bennequin's self-linking formula for a…

In this work, we prove that every complex contact structure gives rise to a distinguished type of almost contact metric 3-structure. As an application of our main result, we provide several new examples of manifolds which admit taut contact…

Contact round surgery of contact 3-manifolds is introduced in this paper. By using this method, an alternative proof of the existence of a contact structure on any closed orientable 3-manifold is given. It is also proved that any contact…

We show that for a large class of contact 3-manifolds the groups of Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian and of framed knots are canonically isomorphic. As a corollary, we obtain that the group of finite order Arnold's $J^+$-type invariants…

We consider closed orientable 3-dimensional hyperbolic manifolds which are cyclic branched coverings of the 3-sphere, with branching set being a two-bridge knot (or link). We establish two-sided linear bounds depending on the order of the…

We consider the problem of realizing tight contact structures on closed orientable three-manifolds. By applying the theorems of Hofer et al., one may deduce tightness from dynamical properties of (Reeb) flows transverse to the contact…

For some families of two-bridge knots, including double-twist knots with genus at least four, we determine precisely the set of integers $n>1$ such that the fundamental group of the $n$-fold cyclic branched cover of the 3-sphere along these…

We classify contact toric 3-manifolds up to contactomorphism, through explicit descriptions, building off of work by Lerman [Lerman03]. As an application, we classify all contact structures on 3-manifolds that can be realised as a concave…

A pair of transverse contact distributions on a 3-manifold will in general admit no 1-parameter families of symmetries: a flow preserving both contact distributions. Here, we will determine local normal forms for such pairs admitting…

We give a combinatorial treatment of transverse homology, a new invariant of transverse knots that is an extension of knot contact homology. The theory comes in several flavors, including one that is an invariant of topological knots and…