Related papers: Thurston norm and Euler classes of tight contact s…

We classify tight contact structures on various surgeries on the Whitehead link, which provides the first classification result on an infinite family of hyperbolic L-spaces. We also determine which of the tight contact structures are Stein…

We establish a criterion that ensures a bounded almost complex curve in a bounded almost complex 4-manifold minimizes genus amongst all smooth surfaces that share its homology class and the transverse link on its boundary. An immediate…

We classify all the $n$-component links in the $3$-sphere that bound a Thurston norm minimizing Seifert surface $\Sigma$ with Euler characteristic $\chi(\Sigma)=n-2$ and that are nearly fibered, which means that their rank of the maximal…

In this paper we provide the classification of tight contact structures on some small Seifert fibered manifolds. As an application of this classification, combined with work of Lekili in \cite{L2010}, we obtain infinitely many…

This paper concerns the problem of existence of taut foliations among 3-manifolds. Since the contribution of David Gabai, we know that closed 3-manifolds with non-trivial second homology group admit a taut foliations. The essential part of…

We consider a compact orientable hyperbolic 3-manifold with a compressible boundary. Suppose that we are given a sequence of geometrically finite hyperbolic metrics whose conformal boundary structures at infinity diverge to a projective…

A connected combinatorial 2-manifold is called degree-regular if each of its vertices have the same degree. A connected combinatorial 2-manifold is called weakly regular if it has a vertex-transitive automorphism group. Clearly, a weakly…

In this paper we study the groups of contactomorphisms of a closed contact manifold from a topological viewpoint. First we construct examples of contact forms on spheres whose Reeb flow has a dense orbit. Then we show that the unitary group…

The conjecture of D.Blair says that there are no nonflat Riemannian metrics of nonpositive curvature compatible with a contact structure. We prove this conjecture for a certain class of contact structures on closed 3-dimensional manifolds…

We prove that the mean Euler characteristic of a Gorenstein toric contact manifold, i.e. a good toric contact manifold with zero first Chern class, is equal to half the normalized volume of the corresponding toric diagram and give some…

A topological version of a longstanding conjecture of H. Hopf, originally proposed by W. Thurston, states that the sign of the Euler characteristic of a closed aspherical manifold of dimension $d=2m$ depends only on the parity of $m$.…

We investigate the combinatorial analogues, in the context of normal surfaces, of taut and transversely measured (codimension 1) foliations of 3-manifolds. We establish that the existence of certain combinatorial structures, a priori weaker…

We prove a folklore theorem of W. Thurston which provides necessary and sufficient conditions for primality of a certain class of theta-curves. Namely, a theta-curve in the 3-sphere with an unknotted constituent knot U is prime if and only…

In this paper, we characterize the second bounded characteristic classes of foliated bundles in terms of the non-descendible quasi-morphisms on the universal covering of the structure group. As its application, we study the boundedness of…

This article sketches various ideas in contact geometry that have become useful in low-dimensional topology. Specifically we (1) outline the proof of Eliashberg and Thurston's results concerning perturbations of foliatoins into contact…

We classify the real tight contact structures on solid tori up to equivariant contact isotopy and apply the results to the classification of real tight structures on $S^3$ and real lens spaces $L(p,\pm 1)$. We prove that there is a unique…

For closed hyperbolic $3$-manifolds $M$ with volume less than a constant $V$, we prove an inequality regarding the geometric $L^2$-norm and the topological Thurston norm, which is qualitatively sharp and verifies a conjecture of Brock and…

Let N be a closed, oriented 3-manifold. A folklore conjecture states that $S^{1} \times N$ admits a symplectic structure if and only if $N$ admits a fibration over the circle. We will prove this conjecture in the case when N is irreducible…

We show that an oriented elliptic 3-manifold admits a universally tight positive contact structure iff the corresponding group of deck transformations on $S^3$ preserves a standard contact structure pointwise. We also relate univerally…

We show that the Alexander and Thurston norms are the same for all irreducible Eisenbud-Neumann graph links in homology 3-spheres. These are the links obtained by splicing Seifert links in homology 3-spheres together along tori. By…