Related papers: Lectures on open book decompositions and contact s…
The first author in recent work with D. Gay developed the notion of a Morse structure on an open book as a tool for studying closed contact 3-manifolds. We extend the notion of Morse structure to extendable partial open books in order to…
In the present paper we describe compatible open books for the fibre connected sum along binding components of open books, as well as for the fibre connected sum along multi-sections of open books. As an application the first description…
We use contact fiber sums of open book decompositions to define an infinite hierarchy of filling obstructions for contact 3-manifolds, called planar k-torsion for nonnegative integers k, all of which cause the contact invariant in Embedded…
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 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…
We lay the foundations of convex hypersurface theory in contact topology, extending the work of Giroux in dimension three. Specifically, we prove that any closed hypersurface in a contact manifold can be $C^0$-approximated by a convex one.…
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…
These lecture notes for the IAS/Park City Graduate Summer School in Geometric Combinatorics (July 2004) provide an overview of poset topology. These notes include introductory material, as well as recent developments and open problems. Some…
We study open book foliations on surfaces in 3-manifolds, and give applications to contact geometry of dimension 3. We prove a braid-theoretic formula of the self-linking number of transverse links, which reveals an unexpected link to the…
In this paper we give explicit, handle-by-handle constructions of concave symplectic fillings of all closed, oriented contact 3-manifolds. These constructions combine recent results of Giroux relating contact structures and open book…
This survey on the topology of Stein manifolds is an extract from our recent joint book. It is compiled from two short lecture series given by the first author in 2012 at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the Alfred Renyi…
This introductory text arises from a lecture given in G\"oteborg, Sweden, given by the first author and is intended for undergraduate students, as well as for any mathematically inclined reader wishing to explore a synthesis of ideas…
The Bourgeois construction associates to every contact open book on a manifold $V$ a contact structure on $V\times T^2$. We study in this article some of the properties of $V$ that are inherited by $V\times T^2$ and some that are not.…
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…
The main aim of the paper is to develop the "Floer theory" associated to Calabi-Yau 3-folds, exending the analogy of Thomas' "holomorphic Casson invariant". The treatment in the body of the paper is largely formal, assuming appropriate…
These are notes from the 2003 C.I.M.E. summer school "symplectic 4-manifolds and algebraic surfaces". They cover the same material as the author's (by now ancient) Ph.D. thesis.
These are lecture notes for a 4h mini-course held in Toulouse, May 9-12th, at the thematic school on "Quantum topology and geometry". The goal of these lectures is to (a) explain some incarnations, in the last ten years, of the idea of…
Quantum graphs have become in this century a favorite playground for mathematicians, mathematical physicists, and chemists, due to their manifold applications as models of thin structures, as well as presenting sometimes simpler playground…
In recent times a great amount of progress has been achieved in symplectic and contact geometry, leading to the development of powerful invariants of 3-manifolds such as Heegaard Floer homology and embedded contact homology. These…
We review Giroux's contact handles and contact handle attachments in dimension three and show that a bypass attachment consists of a pair of contact 1 and 2-handles. As an application we describe explicit contact handle decompositions of…