Related papers: Contact structures and geometric topology

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…

The aim of this paper is to give an alternative proof of a theorem about the existence of contact structures on five-manifolds due to Geiges. This theorem asserts that simply-connected five-manifolds admit a contact structure in every…

We describe Milnor open books and Legendrian surgery diagrams for canonical contact structures of links of some rational surface singularities. We also describe an infinite family of Milnor fillable contact 3-manifolds so that the Milnor…

We describe explicit open books on arbitrary plumbings of oriented circle bundles over closed oriented surfaces. We show that, for a non-positive plumbing, the open book we construct is horizontal and the corresponding compatible contact…

A theorem of Ding and Geiges states that every closed, connected contact $3$-manifold can be obtained from the standard tight contact $3$-sphere by contact $(\pm1)$-surgery along a Legendrian link. The literature also contains some examples…

These are lecture notes from the Clay Mathematics Institute summer school ``Floer Homology, Gauge Theory, and Low Dimensional Topology'' Alfred Renyi Institute; www.claymath.org/programs/summer_school/2004/. The main goal of these notes is…

We prove that every strong symplectic filling of a planar contact manifold admits a symplectic Lefschetz fibration over the disk, and every strong filling of the 3-torus similarly admits a Lefschetz fibration over the annulus. It follows…

Infinitely many contact 3-manifolds each admitting infinitely many, pairwise non-diffeomorphic Stein fillings are constructed. We use Lefschetz fibrations in our constructions and compute their first homologies to distinguish the fillings.

We show that all positive contact surgeries on every Legendrian figure-eight knot in $(S^3, \xi_{\rm{std}})$ result in an overtwisted contact structure. The proof uses convex surface theory and invariants from Heegaard Floer homology.

We consider complements of standard Seifert surfaces of special alternating links. On these handlebodies, we use Honda's method to enumerate those tight contact structures whose dividing sets are isotopic to the link, and find their number…

In this paper we give explicit, handle-by-handle constructions of concave symplectic fillings of all closed, oriented contact 3-manifolds. These constructions combine recent results of Giroux relating contact structures and open book…

Recently there had been a great deal of activity associated with various schemes of designing both analytical and experimental methods describing knotted structures in electrodynamics and in hydrodynamics.The majority of works in…

This paper concerns the Dehn surgery construction, especially those Dehn surgeries leaving the manifold unchanged. In particular, we describe an oriented 1-cusped hyperbolic 3-manifold X with a pair of slopes r_1, r_2 such that the Dehn…

We prove that for any contact 3-manifold supported by a spinal open book decomposition with planar pages, there is a universal bound on the Euler characteristic and signature of its minimal symplectic fillings. The proof is an application…

We produce the first examples of closed, tight contact 3-manifolds which become overtwisted after performing admissible transverse surgeries. Along the way, we clarify the relationship between admissible transverse surgery and Legendrian…

We classify tight contact structures with zero Giroux torsion on some Seifert-fibered manifolds with four exceptional fibers. We get the lower bound by constructing contact structures using Legendrian surgery. We use convex surface theory…

Knot contact homology studies symplectic and contact geometric properties of conormals of knots in 3-manifolds using holomorphic curve techniques. It has connections to both mathematical and physical theories. On the mathematical side, we…

We use contact fiber sums of open book decompositions to define an infinite hierarchy of filling obstructions for contact 3-manifolds, called planar k-torsion for nonnegative integers k, all of which cause the contact invariant in Embedded…

We construct infinitely many Legendrian links in the standard contact $\mathbb{R}^3$ with arbitrarily many topologically distinct Lagrangian fillings. The construction is used to find links in $S^3$ that bound topologically distinct pieces…

We use parameterized Morse theory on the pages of an open book decomposition to efficiently encode the contact topology in terms of a labelled graph on a disjoint union of tori (one per binding component). This construction allows us to…