Related papers: Surgeries on knots and tight contact structures
We prove some classification results for tight contact structure in the 3-space, -ball and -sphere that are invariant with respect to some arbitrary involution, that is conjugated to the standard rotation around the x-axis. Unlike the…
Dehn surgery on a knot determines a dual knot in the surgered manifold, the core of the filling torus. We consider duals of knots in $S^3$ that have a lens space surgery. Each dual supports a contact structure. We show that if a universally…
The $\mathbb{Z}_{2}$-equivariant Heegaard Floer cohomlogy $\widehat{HF}_{\mathbb{Z}_{2}}(\Sigma(K))$ of a knot $K$ in $S^{3}$, constructed by Hendricks, Lipshitz, and Sarkar, is an isotopy invariant which is defined using bridge diagrams of…
In this paper, we study reducible surgeries on knots in $S^3$. We develop thickness bounds for L-space knots that admit reducible surgeries, and lower bounds on the slice genus for general knots that admit reducible surgeries. The L-space…
Two of the basic questions in contact topology are which manifolds admit tight contact structures, and on those that do, can we classify such structures. We present the first such classification on an infinite family of (mostly) hyperbolic…
Suppose $K$ is a knot in a 3-manifold $Y$, and that $Y$ admits a pair of distinct contact structures. Assume that $K$ has Legendrian representatives in each of these contact structures, such that the corresponding Thurston-Bennequin…
We study cosmetic surgeries on a knot in a homology sphere. Several constraints on knots and surgery slopes to admit such surgeries are given. Our main ingredient is the rational surgery formula of the Casson--Walker invariant for…
We prove that for any non-trivial knot K, infinitely many r-surgeries K(r) along K have a unique surgery description along a knot. Moreover, we show that for any hyperbolic L-space knot K and infinitely many integer slopes n, the manifold…
We use monopole Floer homology for sutured manifolds to construct invariants of Legendrian knots in a contact 3-manifold. These invariants assign to a knot K in Y elements of the monopole knot homology KHM(-Y,K), and they strongly resemble…
We establish inequalities that constrain the genera of smooth cobordisms between knots in 4-dimensional cobordisms. These "relative adjunction inequalities" improve the adjunction inequalities for closed surfaces which have been…
In this thesis, we prove several results concerning field-theoretic invariants of knots and 3-manifolds. In Chapter 2, for any knot $K$ in a closed, oriented 3-manifold $M$, we use $SU(2)$ representation spaces and the Lagrangian field…
We discuss various constraints for knots in $S^{3}$ to admit chirally cosmetic surgeries, derived from invariants of 3-manifolds, such as, the quantum $SO(3)$-invariant, the rank of the Heegaard Floer homology, and finite type invariants.…
We study Legendrian and transverse realizations of the negative torus knots $T_{(p,-q)}$ in all contact structures on the $3$-sphere. We give a complete classification of the strongly non-loose transverse realizations and the strongly…
We prove that, like the Seiberg-Witten monopole homology, the Heegaard Floer homology for a three-manifold determines its Thurston norm. As a consequence, we show that knot Floer homology detects the genus of a knot. This leads to new…
We prove that the cut-system complex of a sutured compression body, with vertices representing cut-systems and edges corresponding to handleslides, becomes simply connected when six kinds of 2-cells are attached. Moreover, we define tight…
Previous work of the authors establishes a criterion on the fundamental group of a knot complement that determines when Dehn surgery on the knot will have a fundamental group that is not left-orderable. We provide a refinement of this…
Using contact-geometric techniques and sutured Floer homology, we present an alternate formulation of the minus and plus version of knot Floer homology. We further show how natural constructions in the realm of contact geometry give rise to…
There has been a great deal of interest in understanding which knots are characterized by which of their Dehn surgeries. We study a 4-dimensional version of this question: which knots are determined by which of their traces? We prove…
We define three different types of spanning surfaces for knots in thickened surfaces. We use these to introduce new Seifert matrices, Alexander-type polynomials, genera, and a signature invariant. One of these Alexander polynomials extends…
To a nullhomologous knot $K$ in a 3-manifold $Y$, knot Floer homology associates a bigraded chain complex over $\mathbb{F}[U,V]$ as well as a collection of flip maps; we show that this data can be interpretted as a collection of decorated…