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

For closed oriented manifolds, we establish oriented homotopy invariance of higher signatures that come from the fundamental group of a large class of orientable 3-manifolds, including the ``piecewise geometric'' ones in the sense of…

We survey the interactions between foliations and contact structures in dimension three, with an emphasis on sutured manifolds and invariants of sutured contact manifolds. This paper contains two original results: the fact that a closed…

We show that every braided monoidal category arises as $\End(I)$ for a weak unit $I$ in an otherwise completely strict monoidal 2-category. This implies a version of Simpson's weak-unit conjecture in dimension 3, namely that one-object…

We introduce and analyze the characteristic foliation induced by a contact structure on a branched surface, in particular a branched standard spine of a 3-manifold. We extend to (fairly general) singular foliations of branched surfaces the…

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…

We prove that in dimension 3 every nondegenerate contact form is carried by a broken book decomposition. As an application we get that if M is a closed irreducible oriented 3-manifold that is not a graph manifold, for example a hyperbolic…

We classify up to isotopy the tight contact structures on small Seifert spaces with $e_0\neq0,-1,-2$. (The first version contains on the $e_0<-2$ case.)

A theory of finite type invariants for arbitrary compact oriented 3-manifolds is proposed, and illustrated through many examples arising from both classical and quantum topology. The theory is seen to be highly non-trivial even for…

We study contact structures compatible with genus one open book decompositions with one boundary component. Any monodromy for such an open book can be written as a product of Dehn twists around dual non-separating curves in the…

Contact structures on 3-manifolds are analyzed by decomposing the manifold along convex surfaces. Background results of Giroux, Eliashberg, Colin, and Honda are discussed with an emphasis on examples. Convex decompositions are then used to…

In this article, we study the knots realized by periodic orbits of R-covered Anosov flows in compact 3-manifolds. We show that if two orbits are freely homotopic then in fact they are isotopic. We show that lifts of periodic orbits to the…

Using deformations of foliations to contact structures as well as rigidity properties of Anosov foliations we provide infinite families of examples which show that the space of taut foliations in a given homotopy class of plane fields is in…

The main purpose of this article is to classify contact structures on some 3-manifolds, namely lens spaces, most torus bundles over a circle, the solid torus, and the thickened torus T^2 x [0,1]. This classification completes earlier work…

We employ cut and paste contact topological techniques to classify some tight contact structures on the closed, oriented genus-2 surface times the interval. A boundary condition is specified so that the Euler class of the of the contact…

We give a new proof of Cartan's fixed point theorem using topological fixed point theory. For an odd dimensional, simply connected and complete manifold having non-positive curvature, we further prove that every isometry with finite order…

We study exact orbifold fillings of contact manifolds using Floer theories. Motivated by Chen-Ruan's orbifold Gromov-Witten invariants, we define symplectic cohomology of an exact orbifold filling as a group using classical techniques, i.e.…

We classify compact manifolds of dimension three equipped with a path structure and a fixed contact form (which we refer to as a strict path structure) under the hypothesis that their automorphism group is non-compact. We use a Cartan…

We use the generalized Pontryagin-Thom construction to analyze the effect of attaching a bypass on the homotopy class of the contact structure. In particular, given a 3-dimensional contact manifold with convex boundary, we show that the…

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…

In response to a question raised by Belolipetsky and the first author, we prove that for every finite group $G$ there are infinitely many isomorphism classes of compact complex hyperbolic $2$-manifolds with automorphism group isomorphic to…