Related papers: 1/4-Pinched Contact Sphere Theorem

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…

We study the sectional curvature of plane distributions on 3-manifolds. We show that if the distribution is a contact structure it is easy to manipulate this curvature. As a corollary we obtain that for every transversally oriented contact…

In this note we prove that a four-dimensional compact oriented half-confor\-mally flat Riemannian manifold $M^4$ is topologically $\mathbb{S}^{4}$ or $\mathbb{C}\mathbb{P}^{2},$ provided that the sectional curvatures all lie in the interval…

Let $M$ be a compact orientable Seifered fibered 3-manifold without a boundary, and $\alpha$ an $S^1$-invariant contact form on $M$. In a suitable adapted Riemannian metric to $\alpha$, we provide a bound for the volume $\text{Vol}(M)$ and…

In this article we conjecture a 4-dimensional characterization of tightness: a contact structure is tight if and only if a slice-Bennequin inequality holds for smoothly embedded surfaces in Yx[0,1]. An affirmative answer to our conjecture…

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…

In this paper, we study closed four-dimensional manifolds. In particular, we show that under various new pinching curvature conditions (for example, the sectional curvature is no more than 5/6 of the smallest Ricci eigenvalue) then the…

We show that a compact Riemannian manifold with weakly 1/4-pinched sectional curvatures is either locally symmetric or diffeomorphic to a space form.

The Newman-Penrose-Perjes formalism is applied to smooth contact structures on riemannian 3-manifolds. In particular it is shown that a contact 3-manifold admits an adapted riemannian metric if and only if it admits a metric with a…

In this paper we introduce two new notions of sectional curvature for Riemannian manifolds with density. Under both notions of curvature we classify the constant curvature manifolds. We also prove generalizations of the theorems of…

We extend the classical theory of sphere theorems to the transverse geometry of Riemannian foliations. In this setting, we establish transverse analogues of the Grove-Shiohama diameter sphere theorem and of the Berger-Klingenberg…

There is a conjecture that a complete Riemannian 3-manifold with bounded sectional curvature, and pointwise pinched nonnegative Ricci curvature, must be flat or compact. We show that this is true when the negative part (if any) of the…

We prove that if a closed Riemannian manifold $(M^n,g)$ has finite fundamental group and satisfies the curvature condition \begin{equation*} R_{1313} +R_{1414} +R_{2323} + R_{2424} > \tfrac{1}{2}\left(R_{1212} + R_{3434}\right)…

The famous pinching problem says that on a compact simply connected $n$-manifold if its sectional curvature satisfies $K_{min} > (1/4)K_{max} > 0$, then the manifold is homeomorphic to the sphere. In [8, problem 12], S. T. Yau proposed the…

Recall that the radius of a compact metric space $(X, dist)$ is given by $rad\ X = \min_{x\in X} \max_{y\in X} dist(x,y)$. In this paper we generalize Berger's $\frac{1}{4}$-pinched rigidity theorem and show that a closed, simply connected,…

In a previous paper, we proved a number of optimal rigidity results for Riemannian manifolds of dimension greater than four whose curvature satisfy an integral pinching. In this article, we use the same integral Bochner technique to extend…

Motivated by a previous work of Zheng and the second named author, we study pinching constants of compact K\"ahler manifolds with positive holomorphic sectional curvature. In particular we prove a gap theorem following the work of Petersen…

We say that a nonnegatively curved manifold $(M,g)$ has quarter pinched flag curvature if for any two planes which intersect in a line the ratio of their sectional curvature is bounded above by 4. We show that these manifolds have…

We show that the canonical contact structure on the link of a normal complex singularity is universally tight. As a corollary we show the existence of closed, oriented, atoroidal 3-manifolds with infinite fundamental groups which carry…

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…