Related papers: Uniqueness of the contact structure approximating …
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…
We present a new, completely three-dimensional proof of the fact, due to Gabai-Eliashberg-Thurston, that every closed, oriented, irreducible 3-manifold with nonzero second homology carries a universally tight contact structure.
We take a first step towards understanding the relationship between foliations and universally tight contact structures on hyperbolic 3-manifolds. If a surface bundle over a circle has pseudo-Anosov holonomy, we obtain a classification of…
This article sketches various ideas in contact geometry that have become useful in low-dimensional topology. Specifically we (1) outline the proof of Eliashberg and Thurston's results concerning perturbations of foliatoins into contact…
Let $\mathcal{F}$ be the germ at $\mathbf{0} \in \mathbb{C}^n$ of a holomorphic foliation of dimension $d$, $1 \leq d < n$, with an isolated singularity at $\mathbf{0}$. We study its geometry and topology using ideas that originate in the…
We study contact structures compatible with genus one open book decompositions with one boundary component. Any monodromy for such an open book can be written as a product of Dehn twists around dual non-separating curves in the…
We investigate the local geometry of a pair of independent contact structures on 3-manifolds under maps that independently preserve each contact structure. We discover that such maps are homotheties on the contact 1-forms and we discover…
A real 3-manifold is a smooth 3-manifold together with an orientation preserving smooth involution, which is called a real structure. A real contact 3-manifold is a real 3-manifold with a contact distribution that is antisymmetric with…
We construct a simple topological invariant of certain 3-manifolds, including quotients of the 3-sphere by finite groups, based on the fact that the tangent bundle of an orientable 3-manifold is trivialisable. This invariant is strong…
The description of point defects in chiral liquid crystals via topological methods requires the introduction of singular contact structures, a generalisation of regular contact structures where the plane field may have singularities at…
In this paper, we study the global behaviour of contact structures on oriented manifolds V which are circle bundles over a closed orientable surface S of genus g>0. We establish in particular contact analogs of a number of classical results…
We use monopole Floer homology to study the topology of the space of contact structures on a 3-manifold. Our main tool is a generalisation of the Kronheimer--Mrowka--Ozsv\'ath--Szab\'o contact invariant to an invariant for families of…
We characterize L-spaces which are Seifert fibered over the 2-sphere in terms of taut foliations, transverse foliations and transverse contact structures. We give a sufficient condition for certain contact Seifert fibered 3-manifolds with…
We show that an oriented elliptic 3-manifold admits a universally tight positive contact structure iff the corresponding group of deck transformations on $S^3$ preserves a standard contact structure pointwise. We also relate univerally…
Let V be a closed 3-manifold. In this paper we prove that the homotopy classes of plane fields on V that contain tight contact structures are in finite number and that, if V is atoroidal, the isotopy classes of tight contact structures are…
We use the Boothby-Wang fibration to construct certain simply connected K-contact manifolds and we give sufficient and necessary conditions on when such K-contact manifolds are homeomorphic to the odd dimensional spheres. If the symplectic…
We produce examples of taut foliations of hyperbolic 3-manifolds which are R-covered but not uniform --- ie the leaf space of the universal cover is R, but pairs of leaves are not contained in bounded neighborhoods of each other. This…
We prove that there are only finitely many isoparametrically foliated closed connected Riemannian manifolds with bounded geometry, fixed dimension $n\neq5$, and finite fundamental group, up to foliated diffeomorphism. In addition, we…
A noncompact (oriented) surface satisfies the condition $(\star)$ if their isolated ends are ''accumulated by genus''. We show that every surface satisfying this condition is homeomorfic to the leaf of a minimal codimension one foliation on…
We describe notions of tautness that arise in the study of $C^0$ foliations, $C^{1,0}$ or smoother foliations, and in geometry. We give examples to show that these notions are different, and discuss how these differences impact some…