Related papers: Brieskorn spheres with two fillable contact struct…
In this paper we deal with Seifert fibre spaces, which are compact 3-manifolds admitting a foliation by circles. We give a combinatorial description for these manifolds in all the possible cases: orientable, non-orientable, closed, with…
Compact packings are specific packings of spheres which can be seen as tilings and are good candidates to maximize the density. We show that the compact packings of the Euclidean space with two sizes of spheres are exactly those obtained by…
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…
It was proven in the first author's paper "Contact 3-manifolds twenty years since J. Martinet's work" (Ann. Inst. Fourier, 42(1992), 165--192) that any tight contact structure on the 3-sphere is diffeomorphic to the standard one. It was…
In this paper the 5-dimensional contact SO(3)-manifolds are classified up to equivariant contactomorphisms. The construction of such manifolds with singular orbits requires the use of generalized Dehn twists. We show as an application that…
It has long been known that every quasi-homogeneous normal complex surface singularity with Q-homology sphere link has universal abelian cover a Brieskorn complete intersection singularity. We describe a broad generalization: First, one has…
Fintushel and Stern showed that the Brieskorn sphere $\Sigma(2,3,7)$ bounds a rational homology ball, while its non-trivial Rokhlin invariant obstructs it from bounding an integral homology ball. It is known that their argument can be…
We recognize the Gromoll-Meyer sphere Sigma^7 as the geodesic join of a simple closed geodesic and a minimal subsphere Sigma^5, which can be equivariantly identified with the Brieskorn sphere W^5_3. As applications we in particular…
This thesis considers fillable contact structures on odd-dimensional manifolds. For that purpose, Rabinowitz-Floer homology (RFH) is used which was introduced by Cieliebak and Frauenfelder in 2009. A major part of the thesis is devoted to…
We define \emph{$0$-shifted} and \emph{$+1$-shifted contact structures} on differentiable stacks, thus laying the foundations of \emph{shifted Contact Geometry}. As a side result we show that the kernel of a multiplicative $1$-form on a Lie…
Given any smooth fibration of the unit 3-sphere by great circles, we show that the distribution of 2-planes orthogonal to the great circle fibres is a tight contact structure, a fact well known in the special case of the Hopf fibrations.…
It is known that for every smooth great circle fibration of the 3-sphere, the distribution of tangent 2-planes orthogonal to the fibres is a contact structure, in fact a tight one, but we show here that, beginning with the 5-sphere, there…
It is well known that, among closed spherical Seifert three-manifolds, only lens spaces and prism manifolds admit several Seifert fibrations which are not equivalent up to diffeomorphism. Moreover the former admit infinitely many…
The space of orientation-compatible almost complex structures on the six-dimensional sphere naturally contains a copy of seven-dimensional real projective space. We show that the inclusion induces an isomorphism on fundamental groups and…
We present new explicit tight and overtwisted contact structures on the (round) 3-sphere and the (flat) 3-torus for which the ambient metric is weakly compatible. Our proofs are based on the construction of nonvanishing curl eigenfields…
Inversive geometry can be used to generate exactly self-similar space-filling sphere packings. We present a construction method in two dimensions and generalize it to search for packings in higher dimensions. We newly discover 29…
We prove that any weakly symplectically fillable contact manifold is tight. Furthermore we verify the strong Weinstein conjecture for contact manifolds that appear as the concave boundary of a directed symplectic cobordism whose positive…
We consider certain fiber bundles over a paraquaternionic contact manifolds, called twistor and reflector spaces, and show that these carry an intrinsic geometric structure that is always integrable.
For $n \geq 1$, the twistor space $\mathfrak{Z}(\mathbb{S}^{2n})$ of the conformal $2n$-sphere is biholomorphic to the Zariski closure, taken in the complex Grassmannian manifold $\mathbf{G}(n+1, 2n+2)$, of the set of graphs of…
This paper classifies spherical objects in various geometric settings in dimensions two and three, including both minimal and partial crepant resolutions of Kleinian singularities, as well as arbitrary flopping 3-fold contractions with only…