Related papers: Bourgeois contact structures: tightness, fillabili…

We construct infinitely many non-diffeomorphic examples of $5$-dimensional contact manifolds which are tight, admit no strong fillings, and do not have Giroux torsion. We obtain obstruction results for symplectic cobordisms, for which we…

We lay the foundations of convex hypersurface theory in contact topology, extending the work of Giroux in dimension three. Specifically, we prove that any closed hypersurface in a contact manifold can be $C^0$-approximated by a convex one.…

A geometric obstruction, the so called "plastikstufe", for a contact structure to not being fillable has been found by K. Niederkruger. This generalizes somehow the concept of overtwisted structure to dimensions higher than 3. This paper…

In this paper the 5-dimensional contact SO(3)-manifolds are classified up to equivariant contactomorphisms. The construction of such manifolds with singular orbits requires the use of generalized Dehn twists. We show as an application that…

We give an elementary topological obstruction for a manifold $M$ of dimension $2q{+}1 \geq 7$ to admit a contact open book with flexible Weinstein pages and $c_1(\pi_2(M)) = 0$: if the torsion subgroup of the $q$-th integral homology group…

An interesting question in symplectic topology, which was posed by C. H. Taubes, concerns the topology of closed (i.e. compact and without boundary) connected oriented three dimensional manifolds whose product with a circle admits a…

A topological space is called self-covering if it is a nontrivial cover of itself. We prove that, under mild assumptions, a closed self-covering manifold with an abelian fundamental group fibers over a torus in various senses. As a…

We prove contact big fiber theorems, analogous to the symplectic big fiber theorem by Entov and Polterovich, using symplectic cohomology with support. Unlike in the symplectic case, the validity of the statements requires conditions on the…

We exhibit tight contact structures on 3-manifolds that do not admit any symplectic fillings.

We show that contact homology distinguishes infinitely many tight contact structures on any orientable, toroidal, irreducible 3-manifold. As a consequence of the contact homology computations, on a very large class of toroidal manifolds,…

In this article we introduce and analyze in detail singular contact structures, with an emphasis on $b^m$-contact structures, which are tangent to a given smooth hypersurface $Z$ and satisfy certain transversality conditions. These singular…

We prove, in a geometric way, that the standard contact structure on the real projective space of dimension $2n-1$ is not Liouville fillable for $n \ge 3$ and odd. We also prove that, for all $n$, semipositive fillings of those contact…

We provide examples of contact manifolds of any odd dimension $\geq 5$ which are not diffeomorphic but have exact symplectomorphic symplectizations.

We consider tight contact structures on plumbed 3-manifolds with no bad vertices. We discuss how one can count the number of tight contact structures with zero Giroux torsion on such 3-manifolds and explore conditions under which Giroux…

We introduce symplectic Calabi-Yau caps to obtain new obstructions to exact fillings. In particular, it implies that any exact filling of the standard unit cotangent bundle of a hyperbolic surface has vanishing first Chern class and has the…

Using recent work on high dimensional Lutz twists and families of Weinstein structures we show that any almost contact structure on a 5-manifold is homotopic to a contact structure.

We develop the details of a surgery theory for contact manifolds of arbitrary dimension via convex structures, extending the 3-dimensional theory developed by Giroux. The theory is analogous to that of Weinstein manifolds in symplectic…

We present a new, completely three-dimensional proof of the fact, due to Gabai-Eliashberg-Thurston, that every closed, oriented, irreducible 3-manifold with nonzero second homology carries a universally tight contact structure.

We consider a fixed contact 3-manifold that admits infinitely many compact Stein fillings which are all homeomorphic but pairwise non-diffeomorphic. Each of these fillings gives rise to a closed contact 5-manifold described as a contact…

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…