Related papers: Topological methods in 3-dimensional contact geome…

We review Giroux's contact handles and contact handle attachments in dimension three and show that a bypass attachment consists of a pair of contact 1 and 2-handles. As an application we describe explicit contact handle decompositions of…

In this paper we introduce the notion of contact angle for an immersed surface in three dimensional sphere. We deduce formulas for the Laplacian and for the Gaussian curvature, and we classify minimal surfaces in $S^3$ with constant contact…

We construct infinitely many non-diffeomorphic examples of $5$-dimensional contact manifolds which are tight, admit no strong fillings, and do not have Giroux torsion. We obtain obstruction results for symplectic cobordisms, for which we…

n this paper, we consider a method of constructing flat surfaces based on Ribaucour transformations in the sphere 3-space. By applying the theory to the flat torus, we obtain a families of complete flat surfaces in $S^3$ which are…

We show that there exist infinitely many closed contact 3-manifolds containing half Giroux torsion along a separating torus whose contact invariants do not vanish. This provides counterexamples to Ghiggini's conjecture and suggests that…

We classify positive tight contact structures, up to isotopy fixing the boundary, on the manifolds $N=M(D^{2}; r_1, r_2)$ with minimal convex boundary of slope $s$ and Giroux torsion 0 along $\partial N$, where $r_1,r_2\in…

These notes are an expanded version of an introductory lecture on contact geometry given at the 2001 Georgia Topology Conference. They are intended to present some of the "topological" aspects of three dimensional contact geometry.

We produce a large class of hyperbolic homology 3-spheres admitting arbitrarily many distinct tight contact structures. We also produce a sub-class admitting arbitrarily many distinct tight contact structures within the same homotopy class…

The Bourgeois construction associates to every contact open book on a manifold $V$ a contact structure on $V\times T^2$. We study in this article some of the properties of $V$ that are inherited by $V\times T^2$ and some that are not.…

We present a variety of geometrical and combinatorial tools that are used in the study of geometric structures on surfaces: volume, contact, symplectic, complex and almost complex structures. We start with a series of local rigidity results…

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…

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 extract a nonnegative integer-valued invariant, which we call the "order of algebraic torsion", from the Symplectic Field Theory of a closed contact manifold, and show that its finiteness gives obstructions to the existence of symplectic…

We prove that there is a unique real tight contact structure on the 3-ball with convex boundary up to isotopy through real tight contact structures. We also give a partial classification of the real tight solid tori with the real structure…

These notes are based on a course that took place at the Universit\'e de Nantes in June 2011 during the "Trimester on Contact and Symplectic Topology". We will explain how holomorphic curves can be used to study symplectic fillings of a…

We show that certain classes of contact 3-manifolds do not admit non-separating contact type embeddings into any closed symplectic 4-manifolds, e.g. this is the case for all contact manifolds that are (partially) planar or have Giroux…

We combine Freedman's topology with Eliashberg's holomorphic theory to construct Stein neighborhood systems in complex surfaces, and use these to study various notions of convexity and concavity. Every tame, topologically embedded 2-complex…

In this paper, we provide new and simpler proofs of two theorems of Gluck and Harrison on contact structures induced by great circle or line fibrations. Furthermore, we prove that a geodesic vector field whose Jacobi tensor is parallel…

We prove a Poincar\'e-Bendixson theorem describing the asymptotic behavior of geodesics for a meromorphic connection on a compact Riemann surface. We shall also briefly discuss the case of non-compact Riemann surfaces, and study in detail…

Finding appropriate notions of discrete holomorphic maps and, more generally, conformal immersions of discrete Riemann surfaces into 3-space is an important problem of discrete differential geometry and computer visualization. We propose an…