Related papers: Cosmetic contact surgeries along transverse knots …
We give a complete coarse classification of Legendrian and transverse torus knots in any contact structure on $S^3$.
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…
We define relative versions of the classical invariants of Legendrian and transverse knots in contact 3-manifolds for knots that are homologous to a fixed reference knot. We show these invariants are well-defined and give some basic…
Investigation of the effects of a contact surgery construction and of invariance of contact homology reveals a rich new field of inquiry at the intersection of dynamical systems and contact geometry. We produce contact 3-flows not…
We show that, for any given 3-manifold M, there are at most finitely many hyperbolic knots K in the 3-sphere and fractions p/q (with q > 22), such that M is obtained by p/q surgery along K. This is a corollary of the following result. If M…
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…
We study the geometry of hyperbolic knots that admit alternating projections on embedded surfaces in closed 3-manifolds. We show that, under mild hypothesis, their cusp area admits two sided bounds in terms of the twist number of the…
Codimension 2 contact submanifolds are the natural generalization of transverse knots to contact manifolds of arbitrary dimension. In this paper, we construct new invariants of codimension 2 contact submanifolds. Our main invariant can be…
We extend knot contact homology to a theory over the ring $\mathbb{Z}[\lambda^{\pm 1},\mu^{\pm 1}]$, with the invariant given topologically and combinatorially. The improved invariant, which is defined for framed knots in $S^3$ and can be…
For a knot $K$ with $\Delta_K(t)\doteq t^2-3t+1$ in a homology $3$-sphere, let $M$ be the result of $2/q$-surgery on $K$. We show that an appropriate assumption on the Reidemeister torsion of the universal abelian covering of $M$ implies…
We present a combinatorial approach to the existence of foliations and contact structures transverse to a given pseudo-Anosov flow. Let $\varphi$ be a transitive pseudo-Anosov flow on a closed oriented 3-manifold. Our main technical result…
We give the first examples of a pair of knots $K_1$,$K_2$ in the 3-sphere for which their unknotting numbers satisfy $u(K_1\#K_2)<u(K_1)+u(K_2)$ . This answers question 1.69(B) from Kirby's problem list, "Problems in low-dimensional…
For a knot $K$ in a homology $3$-sphere $\Sigma$, let $M$ be the result of $2/q$-surgery on $K$, and let $X$ be the universal abelian covering of $M$. Our first theorem is that if the first homology of $X$ is finite cyclic and $M$ is a…
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 construct new knot polynomials. Let $V$ be the standard solid torus in 3-space and let $pr$ be its standard projection onto an annulus. Let $M$ be the space of all smooth oriented knots in $V$ such that the restriction of $pr$ is an…
We determine the contact mapping class group of the standard contact structures on lens spaces. To prove the main result, we use the one-parametric convex surface theory to classify Legendrian and transverse rational unknots in any tight…
A revised proof of the author's earlier result is given. It is shown that a boundary surface-link in the 4-sphere is a ribbon surface-link if the surface-link obtained from it by surgery along a pairwise nontrivial fusion 1-handle system is…
It is known that every oriented integral homology 3-sphere can be obtained from S^3 by a finite sequence of Borromean surgeries. We give an explicit formula for the variation of the Casson invariant under such a surgery move. The formula…
For a knot $K$ with $\Delta_K(t)\doteq t^2-3t+1$ in a homology $3$-sphere, let $M$ be the result of $2/q$-surgery on $K$. We show that appropriate assumptions on the Reidemeister torsion and the Casson-Walker-Lescop invariant of the…
A surgery on a knot in 3-sphere is called SU(2)-cyclic if it gives a manifold whose fundamental group has no non-cyclic SU(2) representations. Using holonomy perturbations on the Chern-Simons functional, we prove that the distance of two…