Related papers: Contact handle decompositions

Let M be a closed oriented 3-manifold such that S^1 x M admits a symplectic structure w. The goal of this paper is to show that M is a fiber bundle over S^1. The basic idea is to use the obvious S^1-action on S^1 x M by rotating the first…

We establish the method of holomorphic handle attaching to the strongly pseudoconcave boundary of a complex surface. We use this for proving the following statements: (1) every closed connected oriented contact 3-manifold can be filled as…

In this note we make several observations concerning symplectic cobordisms. Among other things we show that every contact 3-manifold has infinitely many concave symplectic fillings and that all overtwisted contact 3-manifolds are…

In this work, we prove that every complex contact structure gives rise to a distinguished type of almost contact metric 3-structure. As an application of our main result, we provide several new examples of manifolds which admit taut contact…

By a result of Eliashberg, every symplectic filling of a three-dimensional contact connected sum is obtained by performing a boundary connected sum on another symplectic filling. We prove a partial generalization of this result for…

We study cosmetic contact surgeries along transverse knots in the standard contact 3-sphere, i.e. contact surgeries that yield again the standard contact 3-sphere. The main result is that we can exclude non-trivial cosmetic contact…

We prove several results on weak symplectic fillings of contact 3-manifolds, including: (1) Every weak filling of any planar contact manifold can be deformed to a blow up of a Stein filling. (2) Contact manifolds that have fully separating…

We prove that a PL manifold admits a handle decomposition into handles of index $\le k$ if and only if $M$ is $k$-stacked, i.e., it admits a PL triangulation in which all $(d-k-1)$-faces are on $\partial M$. We use this to solve a problem…

Let S be a compact surface - or the interior of a compact surface - and let V be the manifold of cooriented contact elements of S equiped with its canonical contact structure. A diffeomorphism of V that preserves the contact structure and…

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.

In recent times a great amount of progress has been achieved in symplectic and contact geometry, leading to the development of powerful invariants of 3-manifolds such as Heegaard Floer homology and embedded contact homology. These…

In the first part of this paper, we construct infinitely many hyperbolic closed 3-manifolds which admit no symplectic fillable contact structure. All these 3-manifolds are obtained by Dehn surgeries along L-space knots or L-space…

Giroux has described a correspondence between open book decompositions on a 3--manifold and contact structures. In this paper we use Heegaard Floer homology to give restrictions on contact structures which correspond to open book…

The main theorem of this paper is a generalisation of well known results about Dehn surgery to the case of attaching handlebodies to a simple 3-manifold. The existence of a finite set of `exceptional' curves on the boundary of the…

An important class of contact 3--manifolds are those that arise as links of rational surface singularities with reduced fundamental cycle. We explicitly describe symplectic caps (concave fillings) of such contact 3--manifolds. As an…

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…

Codimension 2 contact submanifolds are the natural generalization of transverse knots to contact manifolds of arbitrary dimension. In this paper, we construct new invariants of codimension 2 contact submanifolds. Our main invariant can be…

We construct a small, hyperbolic 3-manifold $M$ such that, for any integer $g\geq 2$, there are infinitely many separating slopes $r$ in $\partial M$ so that $M(r)$, the 3-manifold obtained by attaching a 2-handle to $M$ along $r$, is…

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 study contact manifolds that arise as cyclic branched covers of transverse knots in the standard contact 3-sphere. We discuss properties of these contact manifolds and describe them in terms of open books and contact surgeries. In many…