Related papers: The Self-Linking Number in Annulus and Pants Open …

Given a transverse link in the standard contact 3-sphere, we study the contact manifold that arises as a branched double cover of the sphere. We give a contact surgery description of such manifolds, which allows to determine the Heegaard…

We exhibit a distinctly low-dimensional dynamical obstruction to the existence of Liouville cobordisms: for any contact 3-manifold admitting an exact symplectic cobordism to the tight 3-sphere, every nondegenerate contact form admits an…

It is shown that every knot or link is the set of complex tangents of a 3-sphere smoothly embedded in the three-dimensional complex space. We show in fact that a one-dimensional submanifold of a closed orientable 3-manifold can be realised…

We study the space of "link maps": the space of maps of a disjoint union of compact, closed manifolds P_1, . . ., P_k into a manifold N whose images are pairwise disjoint. We apply the manifold calculus of functors developed by Goodwillie…

In this note we observe that while all overtwisted contact structures on compact 3--manifolds are supported by planar open book decompositions, not all contact structures are. This has relevance to invariants of contact structures and also…

In this second paper of a two-part series, we prove that whenever a contact 3-manifold admits a uniform spinal open book decomposition with planar pages, its (weak, strong and/or exact) symplectic and Stein fillings can be classified up to…

It has been shown by V. Colin that every tight contact 3-manifold can be written as a connected sum of prime manifolds. Here we prove that the summands in this decomposition are unique up to order and contactomorphism.

The classical Kneser-Milnor theorem says that every closed oriented connected 3-dimensional manifold admits a unique connected sum decomposition into manifolds that cannot be decomposed any further. We discuss to what degree such…

In this article we conjecture a 4-dimensional characterization of tightness: a contact structure is tight if and only if a slice-Bennequin inequality holds for smoothly embedded surfaces in Yx[0,1]. An affirmative answer to our conjecture…

Let K and L be disjoint closed oriented submanifolds of the n-sphere, with dimensions adding up to n-1. We define a map from their join K*L to the n-sphere whose degree up to sign equals their linking number, and then use this to find the…

Let n be a positive integer. We provide a Khovanov homology proof of the following classical fact: If the closure of an n-strand braid is the n-component unlink, then the braid is trivial.

We present selfdual manifolds for coupled Potts models on the triangular lattice. We exploit two different techniques: duality followed by decimation, and mapping to a related loop model. The latter technique is found to be superior, and it…

We reformulate the inequalities among self-closeness numbers of spaces in cofibrations making use of homology dimension and show that the self-closeness number of a space is less than or equal to the homology dimension of the space. Then we…

In this paper1 , we use the coding developed by R. Bowen and C. Series to compute the number of self-intersections of a closed geodesic on a pair of pants. We give lower and upper bounds on the number of self-intersections of a closed…

Let $T$ denote a binding component of an open book $(\Sigma, \phi)$ compatible with a closed contact 3-manifold $(M, \xi)$. We describe an explicit open book $(\Sigma', \phi')$ compatible with $(M, \zeta)$, where $\zeta$ is the contact…

It is well-known that a knot in a contact manifold $(M,C)$ transverse to a trivialized contact structure possesses the natural framing given by the first of the trivialization vectors along the knot. If the Euler class $e_C\in H^2(M)$ of…

We give an elementary topological obstruction for a manifold $M$ of dimension $2q{+}1 \geq 7$ to admit a contact open book with flexible Weinstein pages and $c_1(\pi_2(M)) = 0$: if the torsion subgroup of the $q$-th integral homology group…

We define a pants distance for knotted surfaces in 4-manifolds which generalizes the complexity studied by Blair-Campisi-Taylor-Tomova for surfaces in the 4-sphere. We determine that if the distance computed on a given diagram does not…

We exhibit pairs of transverse knots with the same self-linking number that are not transversely isotopic, using the recently defined knot Floer homology invariant for transverse knots and some algebraic refinements of it.

We define relative versions of the classical invariants of Legendrian and transverse knots in contact 3-manifolds for knots that are homologous to a fixed reference knot. We show these invariants are well-defined and give some basic…