Related papers: A contact version of Kirby's theorem
The notion of \emph{contact triad connection} on contact triads $(Q,\lambda,J_\xi)$ was introduced by Wang and the present author in early 2010's from scratch as the contact analog to the canonical connection of an almost K\"ahler…
Motivated by the programmes initiated by Taubes and Perutz, we study the geometry of near-symplectic 4-manifolds, i.e., manifolds equipped with a closed 2-form which is symplectic outside a union of embedded 1-dimensional submanifolds, and…
We prove a surgery formula for the ordinary Seiberg-Witten invariants, and surgery formulas for the families Seiberg-Witten invariants of families of $4$-manifolds obtained through fibrewise surgery. Our formula expresses the Seiberg-Witten…
We use Hamiltonian Floer theory to recover and generalize a classic rigidity theorem of Ekelend and Lasry. That theorem can be rephrased as an assertion about the existence of multiple closed Reeb orbits for certain tight contact forms on…
We propose a novel approach to contact Hamiltonian mechanics which, in contrast to the one dominating in the literature, serves also for non-trivial contact structures. In this approach Hamiltonians are no longer functions on the contact…
We introduce a canonical affine connection on the contact manifold $(Q,\xi)$, which is associated to each contact triad $(Q,\lambda,J)$ where $\lambda$ is a contact form and $J:\xi \to \xi$ is an endomorphism with $J^2 = -id$ compatible to…
Fintushel-Stern's knot surgery gave many pairs of exotic manifolds, which are homeomorphic but non-diffeomorphic. We show that if an elliptic fibration has two parallel, oppositely oriented vanishing circles (for example $S^2\times S^2$ or…
This paper begins the study of relations between Riemannian geometry and contact topology in any dimension and continues this study in dimension 3. Specifically we provide a lower bound for the radius of a geodesic ball in a contact…
We describe Legendrian surgery diagrams for some horizontal contact structures on non-positive plumbing trees of oriented circle bundles over spheres with negative Euler numbers. As an application we determine Milnor fillable contact…
We show that there exists an algorithm that takes as input two closed, simply connected, topological 4-manifolds and decides whether or not these 4-manifolds are homeomorphic. In particular, we explain in detail how closed, simply…
Real Legendrian subvarieties are classical objects of differential geometry and classical mechanics and they have been studied since antiquity. However, complex Legendrian subvarieties are much more rigid and have more exceptional…
We introduce a geometric operation, which we call the relative Whitney trick, that removes a single double point between properly immersed surfaces in a $4$-manifold with boundary. Using the relative Whitney trick we prove that every link…
The main theorem of this paper is a generalisation of well known results about Dehn surgery to the case of attaching handlebodies to a simple 3-manifold. The existence of a finite set of `exceptional' curves on the boundary of the…
We classify tight contact structures with zero Giroux torsion on some Seifert-fibered manifolds with four exceptional fibers. We get the lower bound by constructing contact structures using Legendrian surgery. We use convex surface theory…
From a pseudo-triangulation with $n$ tetrahedra $T$ of an arbitrary closed orientable connected 3-manifold (for short, {\em a 3D-space}) $M^3$, we present a gem $J '$, inducing $\IS^3$, with the following characteristics: (a) its number of…
These are notes of a talk given at the Mathematische Arbeitstagung 2005 in Bonn. Following ideas of Ozbagci-Stipsicz, a proof based on contact Dehn surgery is given of Eliashberg's concave filling theorem for contact 3-manifolds. The role…
This paper is an overview of the idea of using contact geometry to construct invariants of immersions and embeddings. In particular, it discusses how to associate a contact manifold to any manifold and a Legendrian submanifold to an…
We consider two approaches to isotopy invariants of oriented links: one from ribbon categories and the other from generalized Yang-Baxter operators with appropriate enhancements. The generalized Yang-Baxter operators we consider are…
We provide a complete set of two moves that suffice to relate any two open book decompositions of a given 3-manifold. One of the moves is the usual plumbing with a positive or negative Hopf band, while the other one is a special local…
Let S^3_r(K) be the oriented 3--manifold obtained by rational r-surgery on a knot K in S^3. Using the contact Ozsvath-Szabo invariants we prove, for a class of knots K containing all the algebraic knots, that S^3_r(K) carries positive,…