Related papers: On the extrinsic geometry of contact structures
The notions of the interior and truncated connections of a nonholonomic manifold are introduced. A class of extended truncated connections is distinguished. For the case of a contact space with a Finsler metric, it is shown that there…
Two of the basic questions in contact topology are which manifolds admit tight contact structures, and on those that do, can we classify such structures. We present the first such classification on an infinite family of (mostly) hyperbolic…
A $b$-contact structure on a $b$-manifold $(M,Z)$ is a Jacobi structure on $M$ satisfying a transversality condition along the hypersurface $Z$. We show that, in three dimensions, $b$-contact structures with overtwisted three-dimensional…
Discrete forms of the mean and directed curvature are constructed on piecewise flat manifolds, providing local curvature approximations for smooth manifolds embedded in both Euclidean and non-Euclidean spaces. The resulting expressions take…
We prove the existence of families of distinct isotopy classes of physical unknots through the key concept of parametrised thickness. These unknots have prescribed length, tube thickness, a uniform bound on curvature, and cannot be…
We prove that all left-invariant contact structures on three-dimensional Lie groups are tight. The argument is based on Riemannian methods and establishes a unique factorization property for any Lie group admitting a left-invariant contact…
We prove that that if the boundary of a topological insulator divides the plane in two regions containing arbitrarily large balls, then it acts as a conductor. Conversely, we show that topological insulators that fit within strips do not…
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…
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…
We study the rigidity of compact submanifolds of Riemannian manifolds of arbitrary codimension that satisfy a sharp pinching condition involving the norm of the second fundamental form and the mean curvature. Without assuming that the…
A contact foliation is a foliation endowed with a leafwise contact structure. In this remark we explain a turbulisation procedure that allows us to prove that tightness is not a homotopy invariant property for contact foliations.
We prove some classification results for tight contact structure in the 3-space, -ball and -sphere that are invariant with respect to some arbitrary involution, that is conjugated to the standard rotation around the x-axis. Unlike the…
The topological structure of the lines of principal curvature, the umbilic and partially umbilic singularities of all tridimensional ellipsoids of ${\mathbb R}^4$ is described.
We investigate the property of boundary rigidity for the projective structures associated to torsion-free affine connections on connected analytic manifolds with boundary. We show that these structures are generically boundary rigid,…
This paper defines two new extrinsic curvature quantities on the corner of a four-dimensional Riemannian manifold with corner. One of these is a pointwise conformal invariant, and the conformal transformation of the other is governed by a…
Let X be a complex Fano-manifolds with second Betti-number 1 which carries a contact structure. It follows from previous work that such a manifold can always be covered by lines. Thus, it seems natural to consider the geometry of lines in…
We prove that a locally compact space with an upper curvature bound is a topological manifold if and only if all of its spaces of directions are homotopy equivalent and not contractible. We discuss applications to homology manifolds, limits…
We investigate the geometry and topology of compact submanifolds of arbitrary codimension in space forms satisfying a certain pinching condition involving the length of the second fundamental form and the mean curvature. We prove that this…
Contact path geometries are curved geometric structures on a contact manifold comprising smooth families of paths modeled on the family of all isotropic lines in the projectivization of a symplectic vector space. Locally such a structure is…
We determine the local geometric structure of two-dimensional metric spaces with curvature bounded above as the union of finitely many properly embedded/branched immersed Lipschitz disks. As a result, we obtain a graph structure of the…