Related papers: Getting a handle on contact manifolds

We directly connect topological changes that can occur in mathematical three-space via surgery, with black hole formation, the formation of wormholes and new generalizations of these phenomena. This work widens the bridge between topology…

We develop a min-max theory for the construction of capillary surfaces in 3-manifolds with smooth boundary. In particular, for a generic set of ambient metrics, we prove the existence of nontrivial, smooth, almost properly embedded surfaces…

Even though the disk embedding theorem is not available in dimension 4 for free fundamental groups, some surgery problems may be shown to have topological solutions. We prove that surgery problems may be solved if one considers closed…

The three-dimensional topologies of the membrane of M-theory can be constructed by performing Dehn surgery along knot lines. We investigate membranes wrapped around a circle and the correponding subset of topologies (Seifert manifolds). The…

A standard convexity condition on the boundary of a symplectic manifold involves an induced positive contact form (and contact structure) on the boundary; the corresponding concavity condition involves an induced negative contact form. We…

We prove that the canonical 4-dimensional surgery problems can be solved after passing to a double cover. This contrasts the long-standing conjecture about the validity of the topological surgery theorem for arbitrary fundamental groups…

We describe explicit open books on arbitrary plumbings of oriented circle bundles over closed oriented surfaces. We show that, for a non-positive plumbing, the open book we construct is horizontal and the corresponding compatible contact…

We show that the cone associated with a moment map for an action of a torus on a contact compact connected manifold is a convex polyhedral cone and that the moment map has connected fibers provided the dimension of the torus is bigger than…

We give a survey of geometric approaches to the topological 4-dimensional surgery and 5-dimensional s-cobordism conjectures, with a focus on the study of surfaces in 4-manifolds. The geometric lemma underlying these conjectures is a…

We define a relative version of contact homology for contact manifolds with convex boundary, and prove basic properties of this relative contact homology. Similar considerations also hold for embedded contact homology.

$\rm SL(2,\mathbb{C})$ Chern-Simons theory on a closed 3-manifold is one of the most interesting, yet tractable examples of a QFT. On one hand, its non-perturbative structure is not yet fully understood; on the other, the mathematical…

We draw connections between the field of contact topology and the study of Beltrami fields in hydrodynamics on Riemannian manifolds in dimension three. We demonstrate an equivalence between Reeb fields (vector fields which preserve a…

We consider local geometry of sub-pseudo-Riemannian structures on contact manifolds. We construct fundamental invariants of the structures and show that the structures give rise to Einstein-Weyl geometries in dimension 3, provided that…

In this paper we clarify an issue in the knot surgery construction of Fintushel and Stern. Using knot surgery, they construct an infinite number of smooth structures on 4-manifolds satisfying certain conditions, but they do not explicitly…

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…

We classify all contact projective spaces with contact surgery number one. In particular, this implies that there exist infinitely many non-isotopic contact structures on the real projective 3-space which cannot be obtained by a single…

We apply Menke's JSJ decomposition for symplectic fillings to several families of contact 3-manifolds. Among other results, we complete the classification up to orientation-preserving diffeomorphism of strong symplectic fillings of lens…

We consider manifolds endowed with a contact pair structure. To such a structure are naturally associated two almost complex structures. If they are both integrable, we call the structure a normal contact pair. We generalize the Morimoto's…

It is well-known that an n-dimensional Poincar\'{e} complex $X^n$, $n \ge 5$, has the homotopy type of a compact topological $n$-manifold if the total surgery obstruction $s(X^n)$ vanishes. The present paper discusses recent attempts to…

We define the concept of Lefschetz contact pencil and we show the existence of such structures on any contact manifold. The main idea of the proof is a generalization of the Donaldson arguments used in the symplectic case. We will analyze…