Related papers: On the coarse classification of tight contact stru…

The main theorem shows that if M is an irreducible compact connected orientable 3-manifold with non-empty boundary, then the classifying space BDiff(M rel dM) of the space of diffeomorphisms of M which restrict to the identity map on…

Bill Thurston proved that taut foliations of hyperbolic 3-manifolds have Euler classes of norm at most one, and conjectured that any integral second cohomology class of norm equal to one is realised as the Euler class of some taut…

In this paper, we find infinite hyperbolic 3-manifolds that admit no weakly symplectically fillable contact structures, using tools in Heegaard Floer theory. We also remark that part of these manifolds do admit tight contact structures.

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…

We show that the set of harmonic maps from the 2-dimensional stratified spheres with uniformly bounded energies contains only finitely many homotopy classes. We apply this result to construct infinitely many harmonic map flows and mean…

We classify the real tight contact structures on solid tori up to equivariant contact isotopy and apply the results to the classification of real tight structures on $S^3$ and real lens spaces $L(p,\pm 1)$. We prove that there is a unique…

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…

We classify the normal CR structures on $S^3$ and their automorphism groups. Together with [3], this closes the classification of normal CR structures on contact 3-manifolds. We give a criterion to compare 2 normal CR structures, and we…

We give examples of tight high dimensional contact manifolds admitting a contactomorphism whose powers are all smoothly isotopic but not contact-isotopic to the identity. This is a generalization of an observation in dimension 3 by Gompf,…

In this work, we prove that every complex contact structure gives rise to a distinguished type of almost contact metric 3-structure. As an application of our main result, we provide several new examples of manifolds which admit taut contact…

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,…

We introduce the notion of a manifold admitting a simple compact Cartan 3-form $\om^3$. We study algebraic types of such manifolds specializing on those having skew-symmetric torsion, or those associated with a closed or coclosed 3-form…

Two of the basic questions in contact topology are which manifolds admit tight contact structures, and on those that do, can we classify such structures. We present the first such classification on an infinite family of (mostly) hyperbolic…

We study a notion of strict pseudoconvexity in the context of topologically (often unsmoothably) embedded 3-manifolds in complex surfaces. Topologically pseudoconvex (TPC) 3-manifolds behave similarly to their smooth analogues, cutting out…

We construct a simple topological invariant of certain 3-manifolds, including quotients of the 3-sphere by finite groups, based on the fact that the tangent bundle of an orientable 3-manifold is trivialisable. This invariant is strong…

We provide two new proofs of a theorem of Cooper, Long and Reid which asserts that, apart from an explicit finite list of exceptional manifolds, any compact orientable irreducible 3-manifold with non-empty boundary has large fundamental…

For a closed oriented 3-manifold Y, we define an absolute grading on the Heegaard Floer homology groups of Y by homotopy classes of oriented 2-plane fields. We show that this absolute grading refines the relative one and that it is…

In this paper we study the set of projective maps between compact proper convex real projective manifolds. We show that this set contains only finitely many distinct homotopy classes and each homotopy class has the structure of a real…

In this paper we show that a given set of lengths of closed geodesics, there are only finitely many convex cocompact hyperbolic 3-manifolds with that specified length spectrum, homotopy equivalent to a given 3-manifold without a handlebody…

We prove a finiteness result for the $\partial$-patterned guts decomposition of all 3-manifolds obtained by splitting a given orientable, irreducible and $\partial$-irreducible 3-manifold along a closed incompressible surface. Then using…