Related papers: Tight contact structures on some plumbed 3-manifol…
The topology of Stein surfaces and contact 3-manifolds is studied by means of handle decompositions. A simple characterization of homeomorphism types of Stein surfaces is obtained --- they correspond to open handlebodies with all handles of…
We consider the problem of realizing tight contact structures on closed orientable three-manifolds. By applying the theorems of Hofer et al., one may deduce tightness from dynamical properties of (Reeb) flows transverse to the contact…
We prove gluing theorems for tight contact structures. In particular, we rederive (as special cases) gluing theorems due to Colin and Makar-Limanov, and present an algorithm for determining whether a given contact structure on a handlebody…
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…
Whether every hyperbolic 3-manifold admits a tight contact structure or not is an open question. Many hyperbolic 3-manifolds contain taut foliations and taut foliations can be perturbed to tight contact structures. The first examples of…
We exhibit a 3-manifold which admits no tight contact structure.
In this note we make several observations concerning symplectic cobordisms. Among other things we show that every contact 3-manifold has infinitely many concave symplectic fillings and that all overtwisted contact 3-manifolds are…
We present a sketch of the proof of the following theorems: (1) Every 3-manifold has only finitely many homotopy classes of 2-plane fields which carry tight contact structures. (2) Every closed atoroidal 3-manifold carries finitely many…
According to Giroux, contact manifolds can be described as open books whose pages are Stein manifolds. For 5-dimensional contact manifolds the pages are Stein surfaces, which permit a description via Kirby diagrams. We introduce handle…
We prove that any weakly symplectically fillable contact manifold is tight. Furthermore we verify the strong Weinstein conjecture for contact manifolds that appear as the concave boundary of a directed symplectic cobordism whose positive…
Thanks to a result of Lisca and Matic and a refinement by Plamenevskaya, it is known that on a 4-manifold with boundary Stein structures with non-isomorphic Spinc structures induce contact structures with distinct Ozsvath-Szabo invariants.…
We use the Ozsvath-Szabo contact invariant to produce examples of strongly symplectically fillable contact 3-manifolds which are not Stein fillable.
We use convex decomposition theory to (1) reprove the existence of a universally tight contact structure on every irreducible 3-manifold with nonempty boundary, and (2) prove that every toroidal 3-manifold carries infinitely many…
We prove some classification results for tight contact structure in the 3-space, -ball and -sphere that are invariant with respect to some arbitrary involution, that is conjugated to the standard rotation around the x-axis. Unlike the…
We give an algorithm which produces infinitely many pairwise exotic Stein fillings of the same contact 3-manifolds, applying positive allowable Lefschetz fibrations over the disk. As a corollary, for a large class of Stein fillings, we…
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 study a class of simply connected manifolds in all odd dimensions greater than 3 that exhibit an infinite number of toric contact structures of Reeb type that are inequivalent as contact structures. We compute the cohomology ring of our…
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 make some elementary observations concerning subcritically Stein fillable contact structures on 5-manifolds. Specifically, we determine the diffeomorphism type of such contact manifolds in the case the fundamental group is finite cyclic,…
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…