Related papers: On the extrinsic geometry of contact structures

It is a basic question in contact geometry to classify all non-isotopic tight contact structures on a given 3-manifold. If the manifold has a boundary, we need also specify the dividing set on the boundary. In this paper, we answer the…

We show the non existence of manifold structure on certain topological constructions. The main results of this paper are: (1) The wedge of manifold with itself is not a manifold. (2) The cone of a manifold is not a manifold. The main tools…

In this paper we prove that the closed $4$-ball admits non-K\"ahler complex structures with strictly pseudoconcave boundary. Moreover, the induced contact structure on the boundary $3$-sphere is overtwisted.

We employ cut and paste contact topological techniques to classify some tight contact structures on the closed, oriented genus-2 surface times the interval. A boundary condition is specified so that the Euler class of the of the contact…

We formulate a conjecture relating the topology of a manifold's universal cover with the existence of metrics with positive $m$-intermediate curvature. We prove the result for manifolds of dimension $n\in\{3,4,5\}$ and for most choices of…

Final revision. To appear in the Journal of Differential Geometry. This paper studies knots that are transversal to the standard contact structure in $\reals^3$, bringing techniques from topological knot theory to bear on their transversal…

In two dimensional nematics, topological defects are point like singularities with both a charge and a phase. We study topological defects within curved nematic textures on the surface of a cylinder. This allows us to isolate the effect of…

In this paper, we study the global behaviour of contact structures on oriented manifolds V which are circle bundles over a closed orientable surface S of genus g>0. We establish in particular contact analogs of a number of classical results…

We prove the existence of exotic but homotopically trivial contact structures on spheres of dimension 8k-1. Together with previous results of Eliashberg and the second author this establishes the existence of such structures on all…

In this article we give a sharp upper bound on the possible values of the Euler characteristic for a minimal symplectic filling of a tight contact structure on a lens space. This estimate is obtained by looking at the topology of the spaces…

The conjecture of D.Blair says that there are no nonflat Riemannian metrics of nonpositive curvature compatible with a contact structure. We prove this conjecture for a certain class of contact structures on closed 3-dimensional manifolds…

In this article we show that in any dimension there exist infinitely many pairs of formally contact isotopic isocontact embeddings into the standard contact sphere which are not contact isotopic. This is the first example of rigidity for…

We prove some lower bounds on certain nonegative twists of the canonical bundle of a subvariety of a generic hypersurface in projective space. In particular we prove that the generic sextic threefold contains no rational or elliptic curves…

In this article we introduce and analyze in detail singular contact structures, with an emphasis on $b^m$-contact structures, which are tangent to a given smooth hypersurface $Z$ and satisfy certain transversality conditions. These singular…

Using deformations of foliations to contact structures as well as rigidity properties of Anosov foliations we provide infinite families of examples which show that the space of taut foliations in a given homotopy class of plane fields is in…

We introduce a curvature function for planar graphs to study the connection between the curvature and the geometric and spectral properties of the graph. We show that non-positive curvature implies that the graph is infinite and locally…

We prove a topological rigidity theorem for closed hypersurfaces of the Euclidean sphere and of an elliptic space form. It asserts that, under a lower bound hypothesis on the absolute value of the principal curvatures, the hypersurface is…

Solving a long-standing open question in convex geometry, we will show that typical convex surfaces contain points of infinite curvature in all tangent directions. To prove this, we use an easy curvature definition imitating the idea of…

We show that the CR structure on the twistor space of a quaternionic contact structure described by Biquard is normal if and only if the Ricci curvature of the Biquard connection commutes with the endomorphisms in the quaternionic structure…

We prove that a proper geodesic metric space has non-positive curvature in the sense of Alexandrov if and only if it satisfies the Euclidean isoperimetric inequality for curves. Our result extends to non-geodesic spaces and non-zero…