Related papers: Round surgery and contact structures on 3-manifold…
We present new explicit tight and overtwisted contact structures on the (round) 3-sphere and the (flat) 3-torus for which the ambient metric is weakly compatible. Our proofs are based on the construction of nonvanishing curl eigenfields…
In this paper, sufficient conditions for contact $(+1)$-surgeries along Legendrian knots in contact rational homology 3-spheres to have vanishing contact invariants or to be overtwisted are given. They can be applied to study contact…
One method for obtaining every closed orientable 3-manifold is as branched covering of the 3-sphere over a link. There is a classical topological result showing that the minimun possible number of sheets in the covering is three. In this…
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…
In this paper, we study and almost completely classify contact structures on closed 3--manifolds which are totally geodesic for some Riemannian metric. Due to previously known results, this amounts to classifying contact structures on…
This paper describes a characterization of tightness of closed contact 3-manifolds in terms of supporting open book decompositions. The main result is that tightness of a closed contact 3-manifold is preserved under Legendrian surgery.
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…
We introduce and analyze the characteristic foliation induced by a contact structure on a branched surface, in particular a branched standard spine of a 3-manifold. We extend to (fairly general) singular foliations of branched surfaces the…
By use of a variety of techniques (most based on constructions of quasipositive knots and links, some old and others new), many smooth 3-manifolds are realized as transverse intersections of complex surfaces in complex 3-space with strictly…
A theorem of Ding and Geiges states that every closed, connected contact $3$-manifold can be obtained from the standard tight contact $3$-sphere by contact $(\pm1)$-surgery along a Legendrian link. The literature also contains some examples…
In this article, we define the contact surgery distance of two contact 3-manifolds $(M,\xi)$ and $(M',\xi')$ as the minimal number of contact surgeries needed to obtain $(M,\xi)$ from $(M',\xi')$. Our main result states that the contact…
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…
We investigate the line between tight and overtwisted for surgeries on fibred transverse knots in contact 3-manifolds. When the contact structure $\xi_K$ is supported by the fibred knot $K \subset M$, we obtain a characterisation of when…
Topological surgery in dimension $3$ is intrinsically connected with the classification of $3$-manifolds and with patterns of natural phenomena. In this expository paper, we present two different approaches for understanding and visualizing…
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 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…
We establish a parametric extension $h$-principle for overtwisted contact structures on manifolds of all dimensions, which is the direct generalization of the $3$-dimensional result from \cite{Eli89}. It implies, in particular, that any…
It is still not known whether a hyperbolic 3-manifold admits an angle structure or not. We consider angle structures with area-curvature on triangulated pseudo 3-manifolds M in this article. A suficient and necessary condition for the…
In this paper we give explicit, handle-by-handle constructions of concave symplectic fillings of all closed, oriented contact 3-manifolds. These constructions combine recent results of Giroux relating contact structures and open book…
In this paper, we give a simple proof of Lickorish and Wallace's theorem, which states that every closed orientable 3-manifold is obtained by surgery on some link in 3-sphere.