Related papers: Contact Structures, sigma-confoliations, and conta…

Classes of branched surfaces extend the classes of surfaces or 2-dimensional manifolds satisfying suitable properties and defined in various manners. Reeb spaces of smooth maps of suitable classes into surfaces whose codimensions are…

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…

Using contact surgery we define families of contact structures on certain Seifert fibered three-manifolds. We prove that all these contact structures are tight using contact Ozsath-Szabo invariants. We use these examples to show that, given…

We give several criteria on a closed, oriented 3-manifold that will imply that it is the boundary of a (simply connected) 4-manifold that admits infinitely many distinct smooth structures. We also show that any weakly fillable contact…

In this article, we find the complete list of all contact structures (up to isotopy) on closed three-manifolds which are supported by an open book decomposition having planar pages with three (but not less) boundary components. We…

We prove a compactness theorem for holomorphic curves in 4-dimensional symplectizations that have embedded projections to the underlying 3-manifold. It strengthens the cylindrical case of the SFT compactness theorem by using intersection…

We study the topology of the space of smooth codimension one foliations on a closed 3-manifold. We regard this space as the space of integrable plane fields included in the space of all smooth plane fields. It has been known since the late…

In the first part of the paper we associate a pre-additive category $\mathcal{C}(\Sigma)$ to a closed oriented surface $\Sigma$, called the {\em contact category} and constructed from contact structures on $\Sigma\times[0,1]$. There are…

We consider a $3$-manifold $M$ equipped with nondegenerate contact form $\lambda$ and compatible almost complex structure $J$. We show that if the data $(M, \lambda, J)$ admits a stable finite energy foliation, then for a generic choice of…

Simplicial surfaces describe the incidence relations between vertices, edges and faces of triangulated 2-dimensional manifolds in a purely combinatorial way. By considering only the incidences of edges and faces, simplicial surfaces are…

We determine the closed, oriented Seifert fibered 3-manifolds which carry positive tight contact structures. Our main tool is a new non-vanishing criterion for the contact Ozsvath-Szabo invariant.

Cosymplectic and normal almost contact structures are analogues of symplectic and complex structures that can be defined on 3-manifolds. Their existence imposes strong topological constraints. Generalized geometry offers a natural common…

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…

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…

Mitsumatsu constructed leafwise symplectic structures of certain codimension one foliations of the 5-sphere. This inspired the present author to improve his result on convergence of contact structure to foliation. We describe convergence of…

We show that an overtwisted contact structure on a closed, oriented 3-manifold can be defined by a contact form having a Bott-integrable Reeb flow if and only if the Poincar\'e dual of its Euler class is represented by a graph link.

In this article, we propose a new approach for describing and understanding knots and links in a 3-manifold through the use of an embedded non-orientable surface. Specifically, we define a plat-like representation based on this…

We show that the pre-order defined on the category of contact manifolds by arbitrary symplectic cobordisms is considerably less rigid than its counterparts for exact or Stein cobordisms: in particular, we exhibit large new classes of…

We define an invariant, which we call surface-complexity, of closed 3-manifolds by means of Dehn surfaces. The surface-complexity of a manifold is a natural number measuring how much the manifold is complicated. We prove that it fulfils…

In this article we address the existence of positive loops of contactomorphisms in overtwisted contact 3-folds. We present a construction of such positive loops in the contact fibered connected sum of certain contact 3-folds along…