Related papers: Open book decompositions with page a four-puncture…

The intertwining operator constructed in [Sz1,Sz2] does not appear in the right form. It is established there by using only the anticommutators. The correct operator must involve all endomorphisms, which are unified by the Z-Fourier…

This text is a set of lecture notes for a series of four talks given at I.P.A.M., Los Angeles, on March 18-20, 2003. The first lecture provides a quick overview of symplectic topology and its main tools: symplectic manifolds, almost-complex…

We derive constraints on Lagrangian concordances from Legendrian submanifolds of the standard contact sphere admitting exact Lagrangian fillings. More precisely, we show that such a concordance induces an isomorphism on the level of…

According to Giroux, contact manifolds can be described as open books whose pages are Stein manifolds. For 5-dimensional contact manifolds the pages are Stein surfaces, which permit a description via Kirby diagrams. We introduce handle…

We investigate branching of solutions to holonomic bivariate hypergeometric systems of Horn's type. Special attention is paid to the invariant subspace of Puiseux polynomial solutions. We mainly study Horn systems defined by simplicial…

In 1989, Y. Eliashberg proved that two overtwisted contact structures on a closed oriented 3-manifold are isotopic if and only if they are homotopic as 2-plane fields. We provide an alternative proof of this theorem using the convex surface…

This paper shows that there are symplectic four-manifolds M with the following property: a single isotopy class of smooth embedded two-spheres in M contains infinitely many Lagrangian submanifolds, no two of which are isotopic as Lagrangian…

Two constructions of contact manifolds are presented: (i) products of S^1 with manifolds admitting a suitable decomposition into two exact symplectic pieces and (ii) fibre connected sums along isotropic circles. Baykur has found a…

These notes are intended to be an introduction to the use of approximately holomorphic techniques in almost contact and contact geometry. We develop the setup of the approximately holomorphic geometry. Once done, we sketch the existence of…

We consider complements of standard Seifert surfaces of special alternating links. On these handlebodies, we use Honda's method to enumerate those tight contact structures whose dividing sets are isotopic to the link, and find their number…

The first goal of this paper is to construct examples of higher dimensional contact manifolds with specific properties. Our main results in this direction are the existence of tight virtually overtwisted closed contact manifolds in all…

In this paper, we classify the algebraic isomonodromic deformations that can be obtained through restriction to generic lines of logarithmic flat connections on the complex projective plane $\mathbb{P}^2_\mathbb{C}$ whose singular locus is…

A spinal open book decomposition on a contact manifold is a generalization of a supporting open book which exists naturally e.g. on the boundary of a symplectic filling with a Lefschetz fibration over any compact oriented surface with…

We study Liouville fillable contact manifolds $(\Sigma,\xi)$ with non-zero Rabinowitz Floer homology and assign spectral numbers to paths of contactomorphisms. As a consequence we prove that $\widetilde{\mathrm{Cont}_0}(\Sigma,\xi)$ is…

We prove a "splicing formula" for the LMO invariant, which is the universal finite-type invariant of rational homology $3$-spheres. Specifically, if a rational homology $3$-sphere $M$ is obtained by gluing the exteriors of two framed knots…

Let $K$ denote a knot inside the homology sphere $Y$. The zero-framed longitude of $K$ gives the complement of $K$ in $Y$ the structure of a bordered three-manifold, which may be denoted by $Y(K)$. We compute the quasi-isomorphism type of…

We continue our study of the monoid of right-veering diffeomorphisms on a compact oriented surface with nonempty boundary, introduced in [HKM2]. We conduct a detailed study of the case when the surface is a punctured torus; in particular,…

We define family versions of the invariant of 4-manifolds with contact boundary due to Kronheimer and Mrowka and use these to detect exotic diffeomorphisms of 4-manifolds with boundary. Further, we show the existence of the first example of…

We give several criteria on a closed, oriented 3-manifold that will imply that it is the boundary of a (simply connected) 4-manifold that admits infinitely many distinct smooth structures. We also show that any weakly fillable contact…

We investigate the line between tight and overtwisted for surgeries on fibred transverse knots in contact 3-manifolds. When the contact structure $\xi_K$ is supported by the fibred knot $K \subset M$, we obtain a characterisation of when…