Related papers: $n$-Fold Cyclic Branched Covers and Overtwisted Co…

In this paper, we introduce a sequence of invariants of a knot K in S^3: the knot Floer homology groups of the preimage of K in the m-fold cyclic branched cover over K. We exhibit the knot Floer homology in the m-fold branched cover as the…

This is the third in a series of papers constructing hyperbolic structures on all Haken three-manifolds. This portion deals with the mixed case of the deformation space for manifolds with incompressible boundary that are not acylindrical,…

We show that, for any prime p, a knot K in the 3-sphere is determined by its p-fold cyclic unbranched covering. We also investigate when the m-fold cyclic unbranched covering of a knot coincides with the n-fold cyclic unbranched covering of…

In this note we observe that while all overtwisted contact structures on compact 3--manifolds are supported by planar open book decompositions, not all contact structures are. This has relevance to invariants of contact structures and also…

We prove that every strong symplectic filling of a planar contact manifold admits a symplectic Lefschetz fibration over the disk, and every strong filling of the 3-torus similarly admits a Lefschetz fibration over the annulus. It follows…

In an earlier paper we explained how to convert the problem of symplectically embedding one 4-dimensional ellipsoid into another into the problem of embedding a certain set of disjoint balls into \CP^2 by using a new way to desingularize…

The Grassmannian admits an action by a finite cyclic group via the cyclic shift map. We give a simple description of the points fixed by each element of this cyclic group, extending Karp's description of the points fixed by the cyclic shift…

In this note we make several observations concerning symplectic fillings. In particular we show that a (strongly or weakly) semi-fillable contact structure is fillable and any filling embeds as a symplectic domain in a closed symplectic…

We execute Avdek's algorithm to find many algebraically overtwisted and tight $3$-manifolds by contact $+1$ surgeries. In particular, we show that a contact $1/k$ surgery on the standard contact $3$-sphere along any positive torus knot with…

We provide a new type of proof for the Koebe-Andreev-Thurston (KAT) planar circle packing theorem based on combinatorial edge-flips. In particular, we show that starting from a disk packing with a maximal planar contact graph $G$, one can…

We study Vassiliev invariants of links in a 3-manifold $M$ by using chord diagrams labeled by elements of the fundamental group of $M$. We construct universal Vassiliev invariants of links in $M$, where $M=P^2\times [0,1]$ is a cylinder…

We prove the non-left-orderability of the fundamental group of the $n$-th fold cyclic branched cover of the pretzel knot $P(3,-3,-2k-1)$ for all integers $k$ and $n\ge 1$. These $3$-manifolds are $L$-spaces discovered by Issa and Turner.

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 provide two new proofs of a theorem of Cooper, Long and Reid which asserts that, apart from an explicit finite list of exceptional manifolds, any compact orientable irreducible 3-manifold with non-empty boundary has large fundamental…

As shown by Etnyre and Honda in [EH], every contact 3-manifold admits infinitely many concave symplectic fillings that are mutually not symplectomorphic and not related by blow ups. In this note we refine this result in the toric setting by…

Covering moves relate colored link diagrams appearing as the branch sets of simple branched coverings of $S^3$ by the same 3-manifold. We provide a complete set of covering moves on plat closures of braids in each fixed degree $d \geq 4$,…

A divide is the image of a proper and generic immersion of a compact $1$-manifold into the $2$-disk. Due to A'Campo's theory, each divide is associated with a link in the 3-sphere. In this paper, we reveal a hidden hyperbolic structure in…

An important class of contact 3--manifolds are those that arise as links of rational surface singularities with reduced fundamental cycle. We explicitly describe symplectic caps (concave fillings) of such contact 3--manifolds. As an…

We prove gluing theorems for tight contact structures. In particular, we rederive (as special cases) gluing theorems due to Colin and Makar-Limanov, and present an algorithm for determining whether a given contact structure on a handlebody…

We prove that an infinite family of virtually overtwisted tight contact structures discovered by Honda on certain circle bundles over surfaces admit no symplectic semi-fillings. The argument uses results of Mrowka, Ozsvath and Yu on the…