Related papers: The geometry of marked contact Engel structures
We study the geometry of Engel structures, which are 2-plane fields on 4-manifolds satisfying a generic condition, that are compatible with other geometric structures. A \em{Lagrangian} Engel structure is an Engel 2-plane field on a…
We introduce a class of first order G-structures, each of which has an underlying almost conformally symplectic structure. There is one such structure for each real simple Lie algebra which is not of type $C_n$ and admits a contact grading.…
We study topological median algebra structures on Euclidean spaces and, more generally, ER homology manifolds. We show that all such median structures have a local CAT(0) cubulation structure. We also show that topological median algebra…
We apply spectral sequences to derive both an obstruction to the existence of $n$-fold prolongations and a topological classification. Prolongations have been used in the literature in an attempt to prove that every Engel structure on…
A contact manifold is a manifold equipped with a distribution of codimension one that satisfies a `maximal non-integrability' condition. A standard example of a contact structure is a strictly pseudoconvex CR manifold, and operators of…
Shifted symplectic Lie and $L_\infty$ algebroids model formal neighbourhoods of manifolds in shifted symplectic stacks, and serve as target spaces for twisted variants of classical AKSZ topological field theory. In this paper, we classify…
We introduce a modification procedure for Engel structures that is reminiscent of the Lutz twist in 3-dimensional Contact Topology. This notion allows us to define what an Engel overtwisted disc is, and to prove a complete h-principle for…
We construct and study a closed, two-dimensional, quasi-topological (0,2) gauged sigma model with target space a smooth G-manifold, where G is any compact and connected Lie group. When the target space is a flag manifold of simple G, and…
The theory of $G$-structures provides us with a unified framework for a large class of geometric structures, including symplectic, complex and Riemannian structures, as well as foliations and many others. Surprisingly, contact geometry -…
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…
The correspondence between Poisson structures and symplectic groupoids, analogous to the one of Lie algebras and Lie groups, plays an important role in Poisson geometry; it offers, in particular, a unifying framework for the study of…
We study in this paper the cluster category C(S,M) of a marked surface (S,M). We explicitly describe the objects in C(S,M) as direct sums of homotopy classes of curves in (S,M) and one-parameter families related to closed curves in (S,M).…
The main purpose of this article is to classify contact structures on some 3-manifolds, namely lens spaces, most torus bundles over a circle, the solid torus, and the thickened torus T^2 x [0,1]. This classification completes earlier work…
R Kerr's Ricci-flat Lorentz 4-manifold was shown by B Carter in 1968 to support a classically completely integrable system of geodesics; here we interpret this system in terms of a locally conformally symplectic structure, which we identify…
A regular contact manifold is a manifold $M$ equipped with a globally defined contact form $\eta$ such that the topological space $M/\mathcal{R}$ of orbits (trajectories) of the Reeb vector field $\mathcal{R}$ of $\eta$ carries a smooth…
For a semisimple Lie group $G$ with parabolic subgroups $Q\subset P\subset G$, we associate to a parabolic geometry of type $(G,P)$ on a smooth manifold $N$ the correspondence space $\Cal CN$, which is the total space of a fiber bundle over…
Let $C$ be a smooth, projective and geometrically connected curve defined over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q(C)$. Given a semisimple $C-S$-group scheme $\underline{G}$ where $S$ is a finite set of closed points of $C$, we describe the set of…
Two constructions of contact manifolds are presented: (i) products of S^1 with manifolds admitting a suitable decomposition into two exact symplectic pieces and (ii) fibre connected sums along isotropic circles. Baykur has found a…
Studying the M-branes leads us naturally to new structures that we call Membrane-, Membrane^c-, String^K(Z,3)- and Fivebrane^K(Z,4)-structures, which we show can also have twisted counterparts. We study some of their basic properties,…
The structure space S(M) of a closed topological m-manifold M classifies bundles whose fibers are closed m-manifolds equipped with a homotopy equivalence to M. We construct a highly connected map from S(M) to a concoction of algebraic…