Related papers: Topological methods in 3-dimensional contact geome…
This book provides a self-contained introduction to the topology and geometry of surfaces and three-manifolds. The main goal is to describe Thurston's geometrisation of three-manifolds, proved by Perelman in 2002. The book is divided into…
Given a contact structure on a manifold $V$ together with a supporting open book decomposition, Bourgeois gave an explicit construction of a contact structure on $V \times \mathbb{T}^2$. We prove that all such structures are universally…
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…
We consider tight contact structures on plumbed 3-manifolds with no bad vertices. We discuss how one can count the number of tight contact structures with zero Giroux torsion on such 3-manifolds and explore conditions under which Giroux…
It was proven in the first author's paper "Contact 3-manifolds twenty years since J. Martinet's work" (Ann. Inst. Fourier, 42(1992), 165--192) that any tight contact structure on the 3-sphere is diffeomorphic to the standard one. It was…
The algorithm given by Akbulut-Ozbagci constructs an explicit open book decomposition on a contact three-manifold described by a contact surgery on a link in the three-sphere. In this article, we will improve this algorithm by using…
We consider plumbings of symplectic disk bundles over spheres admitting concave contact boundary, with the goal of understanding the geometric properties of the boundary contact structure in terms of the data of the plumbing. We focus on…
We consider geometric triangulations of surfaces, i.e., triangulations whose edges can be realized by disjoint locally geodesic segments. We prove that the flip graph of geometric triangulations with fixed vertices of a flat torus or a…
We prove that a topological contact isotopy uniquely defines a topological contact Hamiltonian. Combined with previous results from [MS11], this generalizes the classical one-to-one correspondence between smooth contact isotopies and their…
The disk complex of a surface in a 3-manifold is used to define its {\it topological index}. Surfaces with well-defined topological index are shown to generalize well-known classes, such as incompressible, strongly irreducible, and critical…
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…
We discuss three mathematical structures which arise in topologically massive abelian gauge theory. First, the euclidean topologically massive abelian gauge theory defines a contact structure on a manifold. We briefly discuss three…
Given a surface $S$ in a 3D contact sub-Riemannian manifold $M$, we investigate the metric structure induced on $S$ by $M$, in the sense of length spaces. First, we define a coefficient $\widehat K$ at characteristic points that determines…
We study the contact geometry of the connected components of the energy hypersurface, in the symmetric restricted 3-body problem on $\mathbb{S}^2$, for a specific type of motion of the primaries. In particular, we show that these components…
This is an introductory text on the more topological aspects of contact geometry, written for the Handbook of Differential Geometry vol. 2. After discussing (and proving) some of the fundamental results of contact topology (neighbourhood…
It is a basic question in contact geometry to classify all non-isotopic tight contact structures on a given 3-manifold. If the manifold has a boundary, we need also specify the dividing set on the boundary. In this paper, we answer the…
Jacques Tits gave a general recipe for producing an abstract geometry from a semisimple algebraic group. This expository paper describes a uniform method for giving a concrete realization of Tits's geometry and works through several…
Topology and geometry are deeply intertwined in the study of surfaces, though their interaction manifests differently in smooth and discrete settings. In the smooth category, a classical result asserts that any closed smooth surface…
In this paper, we study contact structures on any open 3-manifold V which is the interior of a compact 3-manifold. To do this, we introduce proper contact isotopy invariants called the slope at infinity and the division number at infinity.…
We analyze geometrical structures necessary to represent bulk and surface interactions of standard and substructural nature in complex bodies. Our attention is mainly focused on the influence of diffuse interfaces on sharp discontinuity…