Related papers: On the Euler class one conjecture for fillable con…

The well-known tubular neighborhood theorem for contact submanifolds states that a small enough neighborhood of such a submanifold N is uniquely determined by the contact structure on N, and the conformal symplectic structure of the normal…

Let $M$ be a closed hyperbolic $3$-manifold. A homotopy class $[S]$ of surfaces in $M$ is filling if any representative cuts $M$ into components contractible in $M$. We prove that there exist $\epsilon_0, g_0>0$ such that every homotopy…

In this article we present infinitely many 3-manifolds admitting infinitely many universally tight contact structures each with trivial Ozsvath-Szabo contact invariants. By known properties of these invariants the contact structures…

We show that any knot which is smoothly the closure of a 3-braid cannot be Lagrangian concordant to and from the maximum Thurston-Bennequin Legendrian unknot except the unknot itself. Our obstruction comes from drawing the Weinstein…

A foliation of a manifold M is called R-covered if its lift to the universal cover of M has space of leaves R. We show that there are many graph manifolds which admit taut foliations, but which do not admit any R-covered foliations. On the…

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 show that extended graph 4-manifolds with positive Euler characteristic cannot support a complex structure. This result stems from a new proof of the fact that a closed real-hyperbolic 4-manifold cannot support a complex structure.…

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…

We survey the interactions between foliations and contact structures in dimension three, with an emphasis on sutured manifolds and invariants of sutured contact manifolds. This paper contains two original results: the fact that a closed…

In this note, we prove that every closed connected oriented odd-dimensional manifold admits a map of non-zero degree (i.e., a domination) from a tight contact manifold of the same dimension. This provides an odd-dimensional counterpart of a…

Suppose M is a cusped finite-volume hyperbolic 3-manifold and T is an ideal triangulation of M with essential edges. We show that any incompressible surface S in M that is not a virtual fiber can be isotoped into spunnormal form in T . The…

We prove several results on weak symplectic fillings of contact 3-manifolds, including: (1) Every weak filling of any planar contact manifold can be deformed to a blow up of a Stein filling. (2) Contact manifolds that have fully separating…

In this paper, we show that Gromov-Thurston's principle works for hyperbolic 3-manifolds of infinite volume and with finitely generated fundamental group. As an application, we have a new proof of Ending Lamination Theorem. Our proof…

An irreducible open 3-manifold $W$ is {\bf R}$^2$-irreducible if every proper plane in $W$ splits off a halfspace. In this paper it is shown that if such a $W$ is the universal cover of a connected, {\bf P}$^2$-irreducible open 3-manifold…

The aim of this paper is to address the following question: given a contact manifold $(\Sigma, \xi)$, what can be said about the aspherical symplectic manifolds $(W, \omega)$ bounded by $(\Sigma, \xi)$ ? We first extend a theorem of…

We construct open book structures on all moment-angle manifolds and describe the topology of their leaves and bindings under certain restrictions. II. We also show, using a recent deep result about contact forms due to Borman, Eliashberg…

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…

It is known that the folded sum of two contact mapping tori whose fibers are compact exact symplectic manifolds having a common convex boundary (called the ``fold'') admits a cooriented contact structure compatible with the obvious…

We study oriented closed manifolds M^n possessing the following Universal Realisation of Cycles (URC) Property: For each topological space X and each integral homology class z of it, there exist a finite-sheeted covering \hM^n of M^n and a…

If a Legendrian knot $\Lambda$ in the standard contact 3-sphere bounds an orientable exact Lagrangian surface $\Sigma$ in the standard symplectic 4-ball, then the genus of $\Sigma$ is equal to the slice genus of (the smooth knot underlying)…