Related papers: Contact structures and reducible surgeries

We survey aspects of classical combinatorial sutured manifold theory and show how they can be adapted to study exceptional Dehn fillings and 2-handle additions. As a consequence we show that if a hyperbolic knot $\beta$ in a compact,…

This is a companion paper to earlier work of the author, which generalizes to an infinite family of $(2,2w+1)$-cabling of the figure eight knot ($|w|>3$) and proposes general formulas for the two-variable series invariant of the family of…

In this note, we obtain a new result concluding when contact (+1/n)-surgery is overtwisted. We give a counterexample to a conjecture by James Conway on overtwistedness of manifolds obtained by contact surgery. We list some problems related…

A Dehn surgery on a knot $K$ in $S^3$ is exceptional if it produces a reducible, toroidal or Seifert fibred manifold. It is known that a large arborescent knot admits no such surgery unless it is a type II arborescent knot. The main theorem…

Knot contact homology is an invariant of knots derived from Legendrian contact homology which has numerous connections to the knot group. We use basic properties of knot groups to prove that knot contact homology detects every torus knot.…

We use the Ozsv\'ath-Szab\'o contact invariants to distinguish between tight contact structures obtained by Legendrian surgeries on stabilized Legendrian links in tight contact 3-manifolds. We also discuss the implication of our result on…

Two of the basic questions in contact topology are which manifolds admit tight contact structures, and on those that do, can we classify such structures. We present the first such classification on an infinite family of (mostly) hyperbolic…

This paper presents evidence supporting the surprising conjecture that in the topological category the slice genus of a satellite knot $P(K)$ is bounded above by the sum of the slice genera of $K$ and $P(U)$. Our main result establishes…

We show that on a hyperbolic knot $K$ in $S^3$, the distance between any two finite surgery slopes is at most two and consequently there are at most three nontrivial finite surgeries. Moreover in case that $K$ admits three nontrivial finite…

This paper completely answers the question of when contact (r)-surgery on a Legendrian knot in the standard contact structure on the 3-sphere yields a symplectically fillable contact manifold for r in (0,1]. We also give obstructions for…

We show that if $p/q$-surgery on a nontrivial knot $K$ yields the branched double cover of an alternating knot or link, then $|p/q|\leq 4g(K)+3$. This generalises a bound for lens space surgeries first established by Rasmussen. We also show…

We show that for any positive integer $h$, a knot surgered elliptic surface $E(n)_{T(2,2h+1)}$ for a $(2,2h+1)$-torus knot $T(2,2h+1)$ and the elliptic surface $E(1)_{2,2h+1}$ admit handle decompositions without 1- and 3-handles using the…

Each ruling of a Legendrian link can be naturally treated as a surface. For knots, the ruling is 2-graded if and only if the surface is orientable. For 2-graded rulings of homogeneous (in particular, alternating) knots, we prove that the…

We study cosmetic contact surgeries along transverse knots in the standard contact 3-sphere, i.e. contact surgeries that yield again the standard contact 3-sphere. The main result is that we can exclude non-trivial cosmetic contact…

We study the singularities of Legendrian subvarieties of contact manifolds in the complex-analytic category and prove two rigidity results. The first one is that Legendrian singularities with reduced tangent cones are contactomorphically…

For any hyperbolic genus one 2-bridge knot in the 3-sphere, we show that the resulting manifold by $r$-surgery on the knot has left-orderable fundamental group if the slope $r$ lies in some range which depends on the knot.

If a Legendrian knot $\Lambda$ in the standard contact 3-sphere bounds an orientable exact Lagrangian surface $\Sigma$ in the standard symplectic 4-ball, then the genus of $\Sigma$ is equal to the slice genus of (the smooth knot underlying)…

Let $(M,\xi)$ be a contact 3-manifold. We present two new algorithms, the first of which converts an open book $(\Sigma,\Phi)$ supporting $(M,\xi)$ with connected binding into a contact surgery diagram. The second turns a contact surgery…

Using the rational surgery formula for the Casson--Walker--Lescop invariant of links in the $3$-sphere, we show that any null-homologous knot in a rational homology sphere admits at most two pairs of integral purely cosmetic surgeries. We…

We use parameterized Morse theory on the pages of an open book decomposition to efficiently encode the contact topology in terms of a labelled graph on a disjoint union of tori (one per binding component). This construction allows us to…