Related papers: Foliations, contact structures and their interacti…

This is a revision of some expository lecture notes written originally for a 5-hour minicourse on the intersection theory of punctured holomorphic curves and its applications in 3-dimensional contact topology. The main lectures are aimed…

We define an invariant of contact 3-manifolds with convex boundary using Kronheimer and Mrowka's sutured instanton Floer homology theory. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first invariant of contact manifolds -- with or without…

For an oriented irreducible 3-manifold M with non-empty toroidal boundary, we describe how sutured Floer homology ($SFH$) can be used to determine all fibered classes in $H^1(M)$. Furthermore, we show that the $SFH$ of a balanced sutured…

By using cobordism theoretic arguments similar to those in the literature on positive scalar curvature metrics we prove the existence of contact structures on 5-dimensional spin manifolds whose fundamental group is a group of odd order (not…

We show that the pre-order defined on the category of contact manifolds by arbitrary symplectic cobordisms is considerably less rigid than its counterparts for exact or Stein cobordisms: in particular, we exhibit large new classes of…

This expository paper explores the interaction of group ordering with topological questions, especially in dimensions 2 and 3. Among the topics considered are surfaces, braid groups, 3-manifolds and their structures such as foliations and…

We describe a contact analog of the symplectic cut construction. As an application we show that the group of contactomorphisms for a particular overtwisted contact structure on the three sphere contains countably many nonconjugate two tori.

We characterize L-spaces which are Seifert fibered over the 2-sphere in terms of taut foliations, transverse foliations and transverse contact structures. We give a sufficient condition for certain contact Seifert fibered 3-manifolds with…

We generalize a result of Giroux which says that a closed surface in a contact $3$-manifold with Morse-Smale characteristic foliation is convex. Specifically, we show that the result holds in contact manifolds of arbitrary dimension. As an…

The notion of a linear deformation of a codimension one foliation into contact structures was introduced in [5]. This concept is a special type of deformation of confoliations. In this paper, we study linear deformations of pairs of…

We study contact structures compatible with genus one open book decompositions with one boundary component. Any monodromy for such an open book can be written as a product of Dehn twists around dual non-separating curves in the…

We study constructions of contact forms on closed manifolds. A notion of strong symplectic fold structure is defined and we prove that there is a contact form on $M \x X$ provided that $M$ admits such a structure and $X$ is contact. This…

In this paper, we explore the interplay between contact structures and sutured monopole Floer homology. First, we study the behavior of contact elements, which were defined by Baldwin and Sivek, under the operation of performing Floer…

We study R-covered foliations of 3-manifolds from the point of view of their transverse geometry. For an R-covered foliation in an atoroidal 3-manifold M, we show that M-tilde can be partially compactified by a canonical cylinder S^1_univ x…

In this article parametric versions of Wilson's plug and Kuperberg's plug are discussed. We show that there is a weak homotopy equivalence induced by the inclusion between the space of non-singular vector fields tangent to a foliation and…

This paper, which is an outgrowth of a previous paper of the authors, continues the study of dimension 1 foliations on non-metrisable manifolds emphasising some anomalous behaviours. We exhibit surfaces with various extra properties like…

Let Y(r) be the closed, oriented three-manifold obtained by performing rational r-surgery on the right-handed trefoil knot in the three-sphere. Using contact surgery and the Heegaard Floer contact invariants we construct positive, tight…

Motivated by the moduli theory of taut contact circles on spherical 3-manifolds, we relate taut contact circles to transversely holomorphic flows. We give an elementary survey of such 1-dimensional foliations from a topological viewpoint.…

Bourgeois proved in [5] that odd-dimensional tori admit a contact structure. We shall prove a more general result: Any odd-dimensional parallelisable closed manifold admits a contact structure. This implies that a solvmanifold $\Gamma…

We introduce a new Floer theory associated to a pair consisting of a Cartan hypercontact 3-manifold M and a hyperkaehler manifold X.