Related papers: On the Euler class one conjecture for fillable con…
We use the equivalence between embedded contact homology and Seiberg-Witten Floer homology to obtain the following improvements on the Weinstein conjecture. Let Y be a closed oriented connected 3-manifold with a stable Hamiltonian…
In all dimensions $n \ge 5$, we prove the existence of closed orientable hyperbolic manifolds that do not admit any $\text{spin}^c$ structure, and in fact we show that there are infinitely many commensurability classes of such manifolds.…
We give a possible generalization of Lutz twist to all dimensions. This reproves the fact that every contact manifold can be given a non-fillable contact structure and also shows great flexibility in the manifolds that can be realized as…
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 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 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…
We use convex decomposition theory to (1) reprove the existence of a universally tight contact structure on every irreducible 3-manifold with nonempty boundary, and (2) prove that every toroidal 3-manifold carries infinitely many…
This paper grew out of an attempt to find a suitable finite sheeted covering of an aspherical 3-manifold so that the cover either has infinite or trivial first homology group. With this motivation we define a new class of groups. These…
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 show that every closed toroidal irreducible orientable 3-manifold carries infinitely many universally tight contact structures.
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…
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…
An upper bound for the $L^2$- norm of the Euler class $e(\cal F)$ of an arbitrary transversally orientable foliation $\cal F$ of codimension one, defined on a three-dimensional closed irreducible orientable Riemannian 3-manifold $M^3$ is…
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 obtain several results for (iterated) planar contact manifolds in higher dimensions: (1) Iterated planar contact manifolds are not weakly symplectically semi-fillable. This generalizes a 3-dimensional result of Etnyre to a…
We show that for a taut foliation F with one-sided branching of an atoroidal 3-manifold M, one can construct a pair of genuine laminations with solid torus complementary regions which bind every leaf of F in a geodesic lamination. These…
Extending work of Chen, we prove the Weinstein conjecture in dimension three for strongly fillable contact structures with either non-vanishing first Chern class or with strong and exact filling having non-trivial canonical bundle. This…
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…
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…
Given a canonically oriented Brieskorn sphere $Y=\Sigma(a_1,...,a_n)$, we confirm some statements conjectured by Gompf. More specifically, we obstruct the existence of rational homology ball symplectic fillings for any contact structure on…