Related papers: Thurston norm and Euler classes of tight contact s…
In this paper we develop a method for studying tight contact structures on lens spaces. We then derive uniqueness and non-existence statements for tight contact structures with certain (half) Euler classes on lens spaces. We also prove that…
About a decade ago Thurston proved that a vast collection of 3-manifolds carry metrics of constant negative curvature. These manifolds are thus elements of {\em hyperbolic geometry}, as natural as Euclid's regular polyhedra. For a closed…
The Thurston norm is a seminorm on the second real homology group of a compact orientable 3-manifold. The unit ball of this norm is a convex polyhedron, whose shape's data (e.g. number of vertices, regularity) measures the complexity of the…
The Thurston norm of a 3-manifold measures the complexity of surfaces representing two-dimensional homology classes. We study the possible unit balls of Thurston norms of 3-manifolds $M$ with $b_1(M) = 2$, and whose fundamental groups admit…
We study the relationship between two norms on the first cohomology of a hyperbolic 3-manifold: the purely topological Thurston norm and the more geometric harmonic norm. Refining recent results of Bergeron, \c{S}eng\"un, and Venkatesh as…
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 show that for all $n \ge 3$, any $(2n+1)$-dimensional manifold that admits a tight contact structure, also admits a tight but non-fillable contact structure, in the same almost contact class. For $n=2$, we obtain the same result,…
We exhibit an infinite family of tight contact structures with the property that none of the supporting open books minimizes the genus and maximizes the Euler characteristic of the page simultaneously, answering a question of Baldwin and…
We present a sketch of the proof of the following theorems: (1) Every 3-manifold has only finitely many homotopy classes of 2-plane fields which carry tight contact structures. (2) Every closed atoroidal 3-manifold carries finitely many…
We produce examples of taut foliations of hyperbolic 3-manifolds which are R-covered but not uniform --- ie the leaf space of the universal cover is R, but pairs of leaves are not contained in bounded neighborhoods of each other. This…
Suppose that $\mathcal F$ is a transversely oriented, codimension one foliation of a connected, closed, oriented 3-manifold. Suppose also that $\mathcal F$ has continuous tangent plane field and is {\sl taut}; that is, closed smooth…
We study the left-orderability of the fundamental groups of cyclic branched covers of links which admit co-oriented taut foliations. In particular we do this for cyclic branched covers of fibred knots in integer homology $3$-spheres and…
We define a norm on the homology of a foliated manifold, which refines and majorizes the usual Gromov norm on homology. This norm depends in an upper semi-continuous way on the underlying foliation, in the geometric topology, and can…
We extend the Eliashberg-Thurston theorem on approximations of taut oriented $C^2$-foliations of 3-manifolds by both positive and negative contact structures to a large class of taut oriented $C^{1,0}$-foliations, where by $C^{1,0}$…
For a compact, orientable, irreducible 3-manifold with toroidal boundary that is not the product of a torus and an interval or a cable space, each boundary torus has a finite set of slopes such that, if avoided, the Thurston norm of a Dehn…
In this work, we prove that every complex contact structure gives rise to a distinguished type of almost contact metric 3-structure. As an application of our main result, we provide several new examples of manifolds which admit taut contact…
We classify tight contact structures on the small Seifert fibered 3--manifold M(-1; r_1, r_2, r_3) with r_i in (0,1) and r_1, r_2 \geq 1/2. The result is obtained by combining convex surface theory with computations of contact…
In this article we conjecture a 4-dimensional characterization of tightness: a contact structure is tight if and only if a slice-Bennequin inequality holds for smoothly embedded surfaces in Yx[0,1]. An affirmative answer to our conjecture…
Given a triangulation of a closed, oriented, irreducible, atoroidal 3-manifold every oriented, incompressible surface may be isotoped into normal position relative to the triangulation. Such a normal oriented surface is then encoded by…
Thurston's triangulation conjecture asserts that every hyperbolic 3-manifold admits a geometric triangulation into hyper-ideal hyperbolic tetrahedra. So far, this conjecture had only been proven for a few special 3-manifolds. In this…