Related papers: The Self-Linking Number in Annulus and Pants Open …
It is known that any contact 3-manifold can be obtained by rational contact Dehn surgery along a Legendrian link L in the standard tight contact 3-sphere. We define and study various versions of contact surgery numbers, the minimal number…
We describe an explicit open book decomposition adapted to the canonical contact structure on the unit cotangent bundle of a compact surface.
We provide a complete set of two moves that suffice to relate any two open book decompositions of a given 3-manifold. One of the moves is the usual plumbing with a positive or negative Hopf band, while the other one is a special local…
We construct rational models for classifying spaces of self-equivalences of bundles over simply connected finite CW-complexes relative to a given simply connected subcomplex. Via work of Berglund-Madsen and Krannich this specializes to…
We show that if (B,\pi) is an open book decomposition of a contact 3-manifold (Y,\xi), then the complement of the binding B has no Giroux torsion. We also prove the sutured Heegaard-Floer c-bar invariant of the binding of an open book is…
The construction of integer linking numbers of closed curves in a three-dimensional manifold usually appeals to the orientation of this manifold. We discuss how to avoid it constructing similar homotopy invariants of links in non-orientable…
The theory of the Kauffman bracket, which describes the Jones polynomial as a sum over closed circles formed by the planar resolution of vertices in a knot diagram, can be straightforwardly lifted from sl(2) to sl(N) at arbitrary N -- but…
We generalize the familiar notions of overtwistedness and Giroux torsion in 3-dimensional contact manifolds, defining an infinite hierarchy of local filling obstructions called planar torsion, whose integer-valued order $k \ge 0$ can be…
In this paper, we give an open book decomposition for the contact structures on some Brieskorn manifolds, in particular for the contact structures of Ustilovsky. The decomposition uses right-handed Dehn twists as conjectured by Giroux.
We consider collections of disjoint simple closed curves in a compact orientable surface which decompose the surface into pairs of pants. The isotopy classes of such curve systems form the vertices of a 2-complex, whose edges correspond to…
These notes were prepared to supplement the talk that I gave on Feb 19, 2004, at the First East Asian School of Knots and Related Topics, Seoul, South Korea. In this article I review aspects of the interconnections between braids, knots and…
We present a topological interpretation of knot and braid contact homology in degree zero, in terms of cords and skein relations. This interpretation allows us to extend the knot invariant to embedded graphs and higher-dimensional knots. We…
This paper is concerned with lower bounds for the connectivity of graphs (one-dimensional skeleta) of triangulations of compact manifolds. We introduce a structural invariant b_M for simplicial d-manifolds M taking values in the range 0 <=…
We introduce a new geometric structure on differentiable manifolds. A \textit{Contact} \textit{Pair}on a manifold $M$ is a pair $(\alpha,\eta) $ of Pfaffian forms of constant classes $2k+1$ and $2h+1$ respectively such that $\alpha\wedge…
Khovanov homology is an invariant for links in the three sphere that categorizes the Jones polynomial. We extend Khovanov's construction to links in 3-manifolds that are connected sums of orientable interval bundles over surfaces. Cutting…
In this paper, we focus on contact structures supported by planar open book decompositions. We study right-veering diffeomorphisms to keep track of overtwistedness property of contact structures under some monodromy changes. As an…
In this article, we propose a new approach for describing and understanding knots and links in a 3-manifold through the use of an embedded non-orientable surface. Specifically, we define a plat-like representation based on this…
In this note we define three invariants of contact structures in terms of open books supporting the contact structures. These invariants are the support genus (which is the minimal genus of a page of a supporting open book for the contact…
Recently, the explicit volume formulae for hyperbolic cone-manifolds, whose underlying space is the 3-sphere and the singular set is the knot $4_1$ and the links $5^2_1$ and $6^2_2$, have been obtained by the second named author and his…
A companion paper to "On knot Floer homology in branched double covers" applied to braided branched loci. We reprove the main result of that paper concerning alternating branched loci when projected to an annulus, without using Khovanov…