Related papers: Tight contact structures on some plumbed 3-manifol…
It is conjectured that every cusped hyperbolic 3-manifold has a decomposition into positive volume ideal hyperbolic tetrahedra (a "geometric" triangulation of the manifold). Under a mild homology assumption on the manifold we construct…
For $\Gamma_1$-structures on 3-manifolds, we give a very simple proof of Thurston's regularization theorem, first proved in \cite{thurston}, without using Mather's homology equivalence. Moreover, in the co-orientable case, the resulting…
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…
The contact invariant is an element in the monopole Floer homology groups of an oriented closed three manifold canonically associated to a given contact structure. A non-vanishing contact invariant implies that the original contact…
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…
We introduce a new generalization of Gompf nuclei and give applications. We construct infinitely many exotic smooth structures for a large class of compact 4-manifolds with boundary, regarding topological invariants. We prove that a large…
Finite-order invariants of knots in arbitrary 3-manifolds (including non-orientable ones) are constructed and studied by methods of the topology of discriminant sets. Obstructions to the integrability of admissible weight systems to…
We classify tight contact structures with zero Giroux torsion on some Seifert-fibered manifolds with four exceptional fibers. We get the lower bound by constructing contact structures using Legendrian surgery. We use convex surface theory…
In this paper, we study contact structures on any open 3-manifold V which is the interior of a compact 3-manifold. To do this, we introduce proper contact isotopy invariants called the slope at infinity and the division number at infinity.…
We prove several results on weak symplectic fillings of contact 3-manifolds, including: (1) Every weak filling of any planar contact manifold can be deformed to a blow up of a Stein filling. (2) Contact manifolds that have fully separating…
The aim of this paper is to use mapping class group relations to approach the `geography' problem for Stein fillings of a contact 3-manifold. In particular, we adapt a formula of Endo and Nagami so as to calculate the signature of such…
In this survey article we describe different ways of embedding fillings of contact 3-manifolds into closed symplectic 4-manifolds.
We give simple characterizations of contact 1-forms in terms of Dirac structures. We also relate normal almost contact structures to the theory of Dirac structures.
We survey the interactions between foliations and contact structures in dimension three, with an emphasis on sutured manifolds and invariants of sutured contact manifolds. This paper contains two original results: the fact that a closed…
In a recent paper of Akhmedov, Etnyre, Mark and Smith, it was shown that there exist infinitely many contact Seifert fibered 3-manifolds each of which admits infinitely many exotic (homeomorphic but pairwise non-diffeomorphic)…
We study integrability of generalized almost contact structures, and find conditions under which the main associated maximal isotropic vector bundles form Lie bialgebroids. These conditions differentiate the concept of generalized contact…
A spinal open book decomposition on a contact manifold is a generalization of a supporting open book which exists naturally e.g. on the boundary of a symplectic filling with a Lefschetz fibration over any compact oriented surface with…
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…
We establish the method of holomorphic handle attaching to the strongly pseudoconcave boundary of a complex surface. We use this for proving the following statements: (1) every closed connected oriented contact 3-manifold can be filled as…
We characterize the closed, oriented, Seifert fibered 3-manifolds which are oriented boundaries of Stein manifolds. We also show that for this class of 3-manifolds the existence of Stein fillings is equivalent to the existence of symplectic…