Related papers: Topological methods in 3-dimensional contact geome…
Contact structures on 3-manifolds are analyzed by decomposing the manifold along convex surfaces. Background results of Giroux, Eliashberg, Colin, and Honda are discussed with an emphasis on examples. Convex decompositions are then used to…
This paper proves the Giroux Correspondence in dimension three using Heegaard splittings of contact manifolds. In two of the authors earlier paper they proved the Giroux Correspondence for tight contact 3-manifolds via convex Heegaard…
We lay the foundations of convex hypersurface theory in contact topology, extending the work of Giroux in dimension three. Specifically, we prove that any closed hypersurface in a contact manifold can be $C^0$-approximated by a convex one.…
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…
The main purpose of this article is to classify contact structures on some 3-manifolds, namely lens spaces, most torus bundles over a circle, the solid torus, and the thickened torus T^2 x [0,1]. This classification completes earlier work…
We use convex decomposition theory to (1) reprove the existence of a universally tight contact structure on every irreducible 3-manifold with nonempty boundary, and (2) prove that every toroidal 3-manifold carries infinitely many…
We generalize a result of Giroux which says that a closed surface in a contact $3$-manifold with Morse-Smale characteristic foliation is convex. Specifically, we show that the result holds in contact manifolds of arbitrary dimension. As an…
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…
We develop the details of a surgery theory for contact manifolds of arbitrary dimension via convex structures, extending the 3-dimensional theory developed by Giroux. The theory is analogous to that of Weinstein manifolds in symplectic…
This paper presents a new proof of the Giroux Correspondence for tight contact $3$-manifolds using techniques from Heegaard splittings and convex surface theory. We introduce tight Heegaard splittings, which generalise the Heegaard…
This is a revision of some expository lecture notes written originally for a 5-hour minicourse on the intersection theory of punctured holomorphic curves and its applications in 3-dimensional contact topology. The main lectures are aimed…
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…
This paper begins the study of relations between Riemannian geometry and global properties of contact structures on 3-manifolds. In particular we prove an analog of the sphere theorem from Riemannian geometry in the setting of contact…
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 is a survey on contact open books and contact Dehn surgery. The relation between these two concepts is discussed, and various applications are sketched, e.g. the monodromy of Stein fillable contact 3-manifolds, the Giroux-Goodman proof…
A real 3-manifold is a smooth 3-manifold together with an orientation preserving smooth involution, called a real structure. In this article we study open book decompositions on smooth real 3-manifolds that are compatible with the real…
The correspondence between 2-parameter families of oriented lines in ${\Bbb{R}}^3$ and surfaces in $T{\Bbb{P}}^1$ is studied, and the geometric properties of the lines are related to the complex geometry of the surface. Congruences…
Contact round surgery of contact 3-manifolds is introduced in this paper. By using this method, an alternative proof of the existence of a contact structure on any closed orientable 3-manifold is given. It is also proved that any contact…
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 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…