Related papers: Construction of an Engel manifold with trivial aut…
A completely nonintegrable $2$-dimensional distribution on a $4$-manifold is called an Engel structure. A $4$-manifold with an Engel structure is called an Engel manifold. The developing map for an Engel manifold is very important tool to…
We develop a construction of Engel stuctures on 4-manifolds based on decompositions of manifolds into round handles. This allows us to show that all parallelizable 4-manifolds admit an Engel structure. We also show that, given two Engel…
An Engel structure is a maximally non-integrable field of two-planes tangent to a four-manifold. Any two such structures are locally diffeomorphic. We investigate the space of global deformations of canonical Engel structures arising out of…
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 complex Engel structure is an Engel 2-plane field on a complex surface…
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 relate open book decompositions of a 4-manifold M with its Engel structures. Our main result is, given an open book decomposition of M whose binding is a collection of 2-tori and whose monodromy preserves a framing of a page, the…
This paper is about geometric and Riemannian properties of Engel structures, i.e. maximally non-integrable $2$-plane fields on $4$-manifolds. Two $1$-forms $\alpha$ and $\beta$ are called Engel defining forms if…
We study pairs of Engel structures on four-manifolds whose intersection has constant rank one and which define the same even contact structure, but induce different orientations on it. We establish a correspondence between such pairs of…
A holomorphic Engel structure determines a flag of distributions $\mathcal{W}\subset \mathcal{D}\subset \mathcal{E}$. We construct examples of Engel structures on $\mathbf{C}^4$ such that each of these distributions is hyperbolic in the…
Engel structures on M x S^1 and M x I are studied in this paper, where M is a 3-dimensional manifold. We suppose that these structures have characteristic line fields parallel to the fibres, S^1 or I. It is proved that they are…
We show that tori in Engel 4-manifolds behave analogously to knots in contact 3-manifolds: Every torus with trivial normal bundle is isotopic to infinitely many distinct transverse tori, distinguished locally (and globally in the…
In every Engel manifold we construct an infinite family of pairwise non-isotopic transverse tori that are all smoothly isotopic. To distinguish the transverse tori in the family we introduce a homological invariant of transverse tori that…
In early study of Engel manifolds from R. Montgomery, the Cartan prolongation and the development map are central figures. However, the development map can be globally defined only if the characteristic foliation is "nice". In this paper,…
We give a sufficient condition for an $\mathbb{S}^1$-bundle over a $3$-manifold to admit an immersion (or embedding) into $\mathbb{C}^3$ so that its complex tangencies define an Engel structure. In particular, every oriented…
We describe a complete system of invariants for 4-dimensional CR manifolds of CR dimension 1 and codimension 2 with Engel CR distribution by constructing an explicit canonical Cartan connection. We also investigate the relation between the…
Recently there has been renewed interest among differential geometers in the theory of Engel structures. We introduce holomorphic analogues of these structures, and pose the problem of classifying projective manifolds admitting them.…
Given a finite group $G$, the Engel graph of $G$ is a directed graph encoding pairs of elements satisfying some Engel word. From the work of Detomi, Lucchini and Nemmi, the strongly connectivity of the Engel graph of an arbitrary group $G$…
We give two applications of the 2-Engel relation, classically studied in finite and Lie groups, to the 4-dimensional topological surgery conjecture. The A-B slice problem, a reformulation of the surgery conjecture for free groups, is shown…
A contact twisted cubic structure (M,C,S) is a 5-dimensional manifold M together with a contact distribution C and a bundle S of twisted cubics that is compatible with the conformal symplectic form on C. In Engel's classical work, the Lie…
The Engel graph of a finite group $G$ is a directed graph encoding the pairs of elements in $G$ satisfying some Engel word. Recent work of Lucchini and the third author shows that, except for a few well-understood cases, the Engel graphs of…