Related papers: Contact structures and geometric topology

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…

Grid diagrams encode useful geometric information about knots in S^3. In particular, they can be used to combinatorially define the knot Floer homology of a knot K in S^3, and they have a straightforward connection to Legendrian…

We summarize and expand known connections between the study of Dehn surgery on links and the study of trisections of closed, smooth 4-manifolds. In addition, we describe how the potential counterexamples to the Generalized Property R…

We show the existence of a contractible periodic Reeb orbit for any contact structure supported by an open book whose binding can be realised as a hypersurface of restricted contact type in a subcritical Stein manifold. A key ingredient in…

We draw connections between contact topology and Maxwell fields in vacuo on 3-dimensional closed Riemannian submanifolds in 4-dimensional Lorentzian manifolds. This is accomplished by showing that contact topological methods can be applied…

In this paper, we introduce the notions of an iterated planar Lefschetz fibration and an iterated planar open book decomposition and prove the Weinstein conjecture for contact manifolds supporting an open book that has iterated planar…

We explain a connection between the algebraic and geometric properties of groups of contact transformations, open book decompositions, and flexible Legendrian embeddings. The main result is that, if a closed contact manifold $(V, \xi)$ has…

Spinal open book decompositions provide a natural generalization of open book decompositions. We show that any minimal symplectic filling of a contact 3-manifold supported by a planar spinal open book is deformation equivalent to the…

For a closed connected manifold N, we establish the existence of geometric structures on various subgroups of the contactomorphism group of the standard contact jet space J^1N, as well as on the group of contactomorphisms of the standard…

We derive a new exact sequence in the hat-version of Heegaard Floer homology. As a consequence we see a functorial connection between the invariant of Legendrian knots and the contact element. As an application we derive two vanishing…

We construct examples in any odd dimension of contact manifolds with finite and non-zero algebraic torsion (in the sense of Latschev-Wendl), which are therefore tight and do not admit strong symplectic fillings. We prove that Giroux torsion…

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 show that every open book decomposition of a contact 3-manifold can be represented (up to isotopy) by a smooth R-invariant family of pseudoholomorphic curves on its symplectization with respect to a suitable stable Hamiltonian structure.…

This paper begins the study of relations between Riemannian geometry and contact topology in any dimension and continues this study in dimension 3. Specifically we provide a lower bound for the radius of a geodesic ball in a contact…

This paper gives an exposition of the authors' harmonic deformation theory for 3-dimensional hyperbolic cone-manifolds. We discuss topological applications to hyperbolic Dehn surgery as well as recent applications to Kleinian group theory.…

The theory of $G$-structures provides us with a unified framework for a large class of geometric structures, including symplectic, complex and Riemannian structures, as well as foliations and many others. Surprisingly, contact geometry -…

We show that the canonical contact structure on the link of a normal complex singularity is universally tight. As a corollary we show the existence of closed, oriented, atoroidal 3-manifolds with infinite fundamental groups which carry…

In this note we study several aspects of coisotropic submanifolds of a contact manifold. In particular we give a structure theorem for the singularity of the characteristic foliation of a coisotropic submanifold. Moreover we establish the…

We prove that if a contact manifold $(M,\xi)$ is supported by a planar open book, then Euler characteristic and signature of any Stein filling of $(M,\xi)$ is bounded. We also prove a similar finiteness result for contact manifolds…

Cosymplectic and normal almost contact structures are analogues of symplectic and complex structures that can be defined on 3-manifolds. Their existence imposes strong topological constraints. Generalized geometry offers a natural common…