Related papers: A cut-and-paste approach to contact topology
We draw connections between contact topology and Maxwell fields in vacuo on 3-dimensional closed Riemannian submanifolds in 4-dimensional Lorentzian manifolds. This is accomplished by showing that contact topological methods can be applied…
We show that contact homology distinguishes infinitely many tight contact structures on any orientable, toroidal, irreducible 3-manifold. As a consequence of the contact homology computations, on a very large class of toroidal manifolds,…
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…
Using contact homology, we reobtain some recent results of Geiges and Gonzalo about the fundamental group of the space of contact structures on some 3-manifolds. We show that our techniques can be used to study higher dimensional contact…
We show the existence of tight contact structures on infinitely many hyperbolic three-manifolds obtained via Dehn surgeries along sections of hyperbolic surface bundles over circle.
In this note we observe, answering a question of Eliashberg and Thurston, that all contact structures on a closed oriented 3-manifold are $C^\infty$-deformations of foliations.
We study low-dimensional problems in topology and geometry via a study of contact and Cauchy-Riemann ($CR$) structures. A contact structure is called spherical if it admits a compatible spherical $CR$ structure. We will talk about spherical…
This sequel to our previous paper [MS11b] continues the study of topological contact dynamics and applications to contact dynamics and topological dynamics. We provide further evidence that the topological automorphism groups of a contact…
We introduce a notion of positive pair of contact structures on a 3-manifold which generalizes a previous definition of Eliashberg-Thurston and Mitsumatsu. Such a pair gives rise to a locally integrable plane field $\lambda$. We prove that…
In this paper, we explore minimal contact triangulations on contact 3-manifolds. We give many explicit examples of contact triangulations that are close to minimal ones. The main results of this article say that on any closed oriented…
In this paper, we study the global behaviour of contact structures on oriented manifolds V which are circle bundles over a closed orientable surface S of genus g>0. We establish in particular contact analogs of a number of classical results…
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…
We introduce the classes of holomorphic $p$-contact manifolds and holomorphic $s$-symplectic manifolds that generalise the classical holomorphic contact and holomorphic symplectic structures. After observing their basic properties and…
In this note we observe that while all overtwisted contact structures on compact 3--manifolds are supported by planar open book decompositions, not all contact structures are. This has relevance to invariants of contact structures and also…
We exhibit a 3-manifold which admits no tight contact structure.
We show that there exist infinitely many closed contact 3-manifolds containing half Giroux torsion along a separating torus whose contact invariants do not vanish. This provides counterexamples to Ghiggini's conjecture and suggests that…
A real 3-manifold is a smooth 3-manifold together with an orientation preserving smooth involution, which is called a real structure. A real contact 3-manifold is a real 3-manifold with a contact distribution that is antisymmetric with…
The aim of this paper is to give an alternative proof of a theorem about the existence of contact structures on five-manifolds due to Geiges. This theorem asserts that simply-connected five-manifolds admit a contact structure in every…
These are lecture notes on cut-and-paste methods in 3-dimensional contact geometry.
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…