Related papers: A Note on Overtwisted Contact Structures
A contact manifold admittting a supporting contact form without contractible Reeb orbits is called hypertight. In this paper we construct a Rabinowitz Floer homology associated to an arbitrary supporting contact form for a hypertight…
We introduce a notion of "quasi-right-veering" for closed braids, which plays an analogous role to "right-veering" for open books. We show that a transverse link $K$ in a contact 3-manifold $(M,\xi)$ is non-loose if and only if every braid…
A combinatorial Morse structure encodes a mapping class for a surface with boundary, and the data may be efficiently represented via a Morse diagram. This diagram determines an open book decomposition of a 3-manifold, and hence, a contact…
We discuss how the fractional Dehn twist coefficient behaves under a fully ramified branched covering of an open book, and give applications to both topological and contact 3-manifolds. Among them, we show that non-right-veering closed…
The topology of Stein surfaces and contact 3-manifolds is studied by means of handle decompositions. A simple characterization of homeomorphism types of Stein surfaces is obtained --- they correspond to open handlebodies with all handles of…
Positive Dehn twist products for some elements of finite order in the mapping class group of a 2-dimensional closed, compact, oriented surface $\Sigma_g$, which are rotations of $\Sigma_g$ through $2\pi /p$, are presented. The homeomorphism…
In this note we observe, answering a question of Eliashberg and Thurston, that all contact structures on a closed oriented 3-manifold are $C^\infty$-deformations of foliations.
The twisted face-pairing construction of our earlier papers gives an efficient way of generating, mechanically and with little effort, myriads of relatively simple face-pairing descriptions of interesting closed 3-manifolds. The…
We prove that closed connected contact manifolds of dimension $\geq 5$ related by an h-cobordism with a flexible Weinstein structure become contactomorphic after some kind of stabilization. We also provide examples of non-conjugate contact…
We show that the pre-order defined on the category of contact manifolds by arbitrary symplectic cobordisms is considerably less rigid than its counterparts for exact or Stein cobordisms: in particular, we exhibit large new classes of…
The tight versus overtwisted dichotomy has been an essential organizing principle and driving force in 3-dimensional contact geometry since its inception around 1990. In this article, we will discuss the genesis of this dichotomy in…
Let $W$ be a nonorientable $4$-dimensional handlebody without $3$- and $4$-handles. We show that $W$ admits a Lefschetz fibration over the $2$-disk, whose regular fiber is a nonorientable surface with nonempty boundary. This is an analogue…
This note has two related but independent parts. Firstly, we prove a generalisation of a recent result of Gay on the smooth mapping class group of $S^4$. Secondly, we give an alternative proof of a consequence of work of Saeki, namely that…
We use convex decomposition theory to (1) reprove the existence of a universally tight contact structure on every irreducible 3-manifold with nonempty boundary, and (2) prove that every toroidal 3-manifold carries infinitely many…
The first author in recent work with D. Gay developed the notion of a Morse structure on an open book as a tool for studying closed contact 3-manifolds. We extend the notion of Morse structure to extendable partial open books in order to…
In this paper, we explore minimal contact triangulations on contact 3-manifolds. We give many explicit examples of contact triangulations that are close to minimal ones. The main results of this article say that on any closed oriented…
We discuss embedding of manifolds in the category of open books, contact manifolds and contact open books. We prove an open book version of the Haefliger--Hirsch embedding theorem by showing that every $k$-connected closed $n$-manifold…
In this paper, we show that the Ozsv\'ath-Szab\'o contact invariant $c^+(\xi)\in HF^+(-Y)$ of a contact 3-manifold $(Y,\xi)$ can be calculated combinatorially if $Y$ is the boundary of a certain type of plumbing $X$, and $\xi$ is induced by…
We describe explicit horizontal open books on some Seifert fibered 3--manifolds. We show that the contact structures compatible with these horizontal open books are Stein fillable and horizontal as well. Moreover we draw surgery diagrams…
This paper describes a characterization of tightness of closed contact 3-manifolds in terms of supporting open book decompositions. The main result is that tightness of a closed contact 3-manifold is preserved under Legendrian surgery.