Related papers: Mapping class group relations, Stein fillings, and…

The first goal of this paper is to construct examples of higher dimensional contact manifolds with specific properties. Our main results in this direction are the existence of tight virtually overtwisted closed contact manifolds in all…

Motivated by the desire of finding a geometric interpretation to the Yamabe equation on groups of Heisenberg type, we define a geometric structure on manifolds modelled locally on these groups, which we call contact structure of Heisenberg…

Emmanuel Giroux showed that every contact structure on a closed three dimensional manifold is supported by an open book decomposition. We will extend this result by showing that the open book decomposition can be chosen in such a way that…

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…

A function from configuration space to moduli space of surface may induce a homomorphism between their fundamental groups which are braid groups and mapping class groups of surface, respectively. This map $\phi: B_k \rightarrow…

The mapping class group of a compact oriented surface of genus greater than one with boundary acts ergodically on connected components of the representation variety corresponding to a connected compact Lie group, for every choice of…

On small Seifert fibered spaces $M(e_0;r_1,r_2,r_3)$ with $e_0\neq-1,-2,$ all tight contact structures are Stein fillable. This is not the case for $e_0=-1$ or $-2$. However, for negative twisting structures it is expected that they are all…

In this note, we exhibit infinite families of tight non-fillable contact manifolds supported by planar open books with vanishing Heegaard Floer contact invariants. Moreover, we also exhibit an infinite such family where the supported…

We prove a quantitative estimate with a power saving error term for the number of filling closed geodesics of a given topological type and length $\leq L$ on an arbitrary closed, orientable, negatively curved surface. More generally, we…

We construct a Seifert surface for a given null-homologous transverse link in a contact manifold that is compatible with a planar open book decomposition, then obtain a formula of the self-linking number. It extends Bennequin's self-linking…

We consider finite-sheeted, regular, possibly branched covering spaces of compact surfaces with boundary and the associated liftable and symmetric mapping class groups. In particular, we classify when either of these subgroups coincides…

For a compact contact manifold it is shown that the anisotropic Folland-Stein function spaces form an algebra. The notion of anisotropic regularity is extended to define the space of Folland-Stein contact diffeomorphisms, which is shown to…

We use contact handle decompositions and a stabilization process to compute the cylindrical contact homology of a subcritical Stein-fillable contact manifold with vanishing first Chern class, and show that it is completely determined by the…

This paper has three parts. The first part is a general introduction to rigidity and to rigid actions of mapping class group actions on various spaces. In the second part, we describe in detail four rigidity results that concern actions of…

We describe symplectic mapping class relations between products of positive Dehn twists along Lagrangian spheres in Weinstein $4$-manifolds, all of which are affine $\mathbb{C}$ varieties. The relations are obtained by applying…

We describe a cocompact model for the classifying space for proper actions of the mapping class group of a surface with punctures and boundary components. Our construction relies on a known model for the case of a closed surface and uses an…

The first author in recent work with D. Gay developed the notion of a Morse structure on an open book as a tool for studying closed contact 3-manifolds. We extend the notion of Morse structure to extendable partial open books in order to…

We consider a homological enlargement of the mapping class group, defined by homology cylinders over a closed oriented surface (up to homology cobordism). These are important model objects in the recent Goussarov-Habiro theory of…

We define an invariant of contact 3-manifolds with convex boundary using Kronheimer and Mrowka's sutured instanton Floer homology theory. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first invariant of contact manifolds -- with or without…

We study the Steiner tree problem on map graphs, which substantially generalize planar graphs as they allow arbitrarily large cliques. We obtain a PTAS for Steiner tree on map graphs, which builds on the result for planar edge weighted…