Related papers: Tight and overtwisted contact structures

This is an introductory text on the more topological aspects of contact geometry, written for the Handbook of Differential Geometry vol. 2. After discussing (and proving) some of the fundamental results of contact topology (neighbourhood…

We present a new construction of codimension-one foliations from pairs of contact structures in dimension three. This constitutes a converse result to a celebrated theorem of Eliashberg and Thurston on approximations of foliations by…

Recently there had been a great deal of activity associated with various schemes of designing both analytical and experimental methods describing knotted structures in electrodynamics and in hydrodynamics.The majority of works in…

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…

In this note, we use the recent work of Honda-Kazez-Matic [HKM] to prove that a closed contact 3-manifold admitting a compatible open book decomposition with a nontrivial monodromy which can be presented as a product of left handed Dehn…

We show the equivalence of several notions in the theory of taut foliations and the theory of tight contact structures. We prove equivalence, in certain cases, of existence of tight contact structures and taut foliations.

The main purpose of this article is to classify contact structures on some 3-manifolds, namely lens spaces, most torus bundles over a circle, the solid torus, and the thickened torus T^2 x [0,1]. This classification completes earlier work…

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…

This is a revision of some expository lecture notes written originally for a 5-hour minicourse on the intersection theory of punctured holomorphic curves and its applications in 3-dimensional contact topology. The main lectures are aimed…

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…

Fractional Dehn twists give a measure of the difference between the relative isotopy class of a homeomorphism of a bordered surface and the Thurston representative of its free isotopy class. We show how to estimate and compute these…

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 establish geometric criteria to decide whether a contact manifold is overtwisted. Starting with the original definition, we first relate the different overtwisted disks in each dimension and show that a manifold is overtwisted if the…

A contact foliation is a foliation endowed with a leafwise contact structure. In this remark we explain a turbulisation procedure that allows us to prove that tightness is not a homotopy invariant property for contact foliations.

In this paper, we study contact structures on any open 3-manifold V which is the interior of a compact 3-manifold. To do this, we introduce proper contact isotopy invariants called the slope at infinity and the division number at infinity.…

The paper deals with topologically trivial Legendrian knots in tight and overtwisted contact 3-manifolds. The first part contains a thorough exposition of the proof of the classification of topologically trivial Legendrian knots (i.e.…

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…

These notes provide an introduction to Giroux's theory of convex surfaces in contact 3-manifolds and its simplest applications. They put a special emphasis on pictures and discussions of explicit examples. The first goal is to explain why…

Contact Geometry is an odd dimensional analogue of Symplectic Geometry. This vague idea can actually be formalized in a rather precise way by means of a Symplectic-to-Contact Dictionary. The aim of this review paper is discussing the basic…

For contact manifolds in dimension three, the notions of weak and strong symplectic fillability and tightness are all known to be inequivalent. We extend these facts to higher dimensions: in particular, we define a natural generalization of…