Related papers: A cut-and-paste approach to contact topology

This survey/expository article covers a variety of topics related to the "topology at infinity" of noncompact manifolds and complexes. In manifold topology and geometric group theory, the most important noncompact spaces are often…

Recently there had been a great deal of activity associated with various schemes of designing both analytical and experimental methods describing knotted structures in electrodynamics and in hydrodynamics.The majority of works in…

We determine parts of the contact homology of certain contact 3-manifolds in the framework of open book decompositions, due to Giroux. We study two cases: when the monodromy map of the compatible open book is periodic and when it is…

We consider collections of disjoint simple closed curves in a compact orientable surface which decompose the surface into pairs of pants. The isotopy classes of such curve systems form the vertices of a 2-complex, whose edges correspond to…

We establish a JSJ-type decomposition theorem for splitting exact symplectic fillings of contact 3-manifolds along \emph{mixed tori} -- these are convex tori satisfying a particular geometric condition. As an application, we show that if…

We consider a generalization of Einstein-Sasaki manifolds, which we characterize in terms both of spinors and differential forms, that in the real analytic case corresponds to contact manifolds whose symplectic cone is Calabi-Yau. We…

Given a fibred hyperbolic 3-manifold with boundary, we coarsely relate the Euclidean geometry of its cusps to the classical fractional Dehn twist coefficient of its monodromy. This result fits into the broader programme of coarsely…

We generalize the familiar notions of overtwistedness and Giroux torsion in 3-dimensional contact manifolds, defining an infinite hierarchy of local filling obstructions called planar torsion, whose integer-valued order $k \ge 0$ can be…

We study open books (or open book decompositions) of a closed oriented 3-manifold which support overtwisted contact structures. We focus on a simple closed curve along which one can perform Stallings twist, called ``twisting loop''. We show…

We exhibit the first examples of exotic contactomorphisms with infinite order as elements of the contact mapping class group. These are given by certain Dehn twists on the separating sphere in a connected sum of two closed contact…

This expository paper explores the interaction of group ordering with topological questions, especially in dimensions 2 and 3. Among the topics considered are surfaces, braid groups, 3-manifolds and their structures such as foliations and…

We show that on any closed contact manifold of dimension greater than 1 a contact structure with vanishing contact homology can be constructed. The basic idea for the construction comes from Giroux. We use a special open book decomposition…

Motivated by the moduli theory of taut contact circles on spherical 3-manifolds, we relate taut contact circles to transversely holomorphic flows. We give an elementary survey of such 1-dimensional foliations from a topological viewpoint.…

We use monopole Floer homology to study the topology of the space of contact structures on a 3-manifold. Our main tool is a generalisation of the Kronheimer--Mrowka--Ozsv\'ath--Szab\'o contact invariant to an invariant for families of…

We study constructions of contact forms on closed manifolds. A notion of strong symplectic fold structure is defined and we prove that there is a contact form on $M \x X$ provided that $M$ admits such a structure and $X$ is contact. This…

The Newman-Penrose-Perjes formalism is applied to smooth contact structures on riemannian 3-manifolds. In particular it is shown that a contact 3-manifold admits an adapted riemannian metric if and only if it admits a metric with a…

In this paper we show that any good toric contact manifold has well defined cylindrical contact homology and describe how it can be combinatorially computed from the associated moment cone. As an application we compute the cylindrical…

We study weak versus strong symplectic fillability of some tight contact structures on torus bundles over the circle. In particular, we prove that almost all of these tight contact structures are weakly, but not strongly symplectically…

By use of a variety of techniques (most based on constructions of quasipositive knots and links, some old and others new), many smooth 3-manifolds are realized as transverse intersections of complex surfaces in complex 3-space with strictly…

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…