Related papers: Brieskorn manifolds as contact branched covers of …
We show that a transverse link in a contact structure supported by an open book decomposition can be transversely braided. We also generalize Markov's theorem on when the closures of two braids represent (transversely) isotopic links.
Given a transverse link in the standard contact 3-sphere, we study the contact manifold that arises as a branched double cover of the sphere. We give a contact surgery description of such manifolds, which allows to determine the Heegaard…
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…
In this paper we write explicitly the open book decompositions of links of quotient surface singularities supporting the corresponding unique Milnor fillable contact structure. The page-genus of these Milnor open books are minimal among all…
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…
It is known that any contact 3-manifold can be obtained by rational contact Dehn surgery along a Legendrian link L in the standard tight contact 3-sphere. We define and study various versions of contact surgery numbers, the minimal number…
This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, we use symplectic homology to distinguish the contact structures on the Brieskorn manifolds $\Sigma(2l,2,2,2)$, which contact homology cannot distinguish. This answers a question from…
It has long been known that every quasi-homogeneous normal complex surface singularity with Q-homology sphere link has universal abelian cover a Brieskorn complete intersection singularity. We describe a broad generalization: First, one has…
A filling Dehn surface in a $3$-manifold $M$ is a generically immersed surface in $M$ that induces a cellular decomposition of $M$. Given a tame link $L$ in $M$ there is a filling Dehn sphere of $M$ that "trivializes" (\emph{diametrically…
In this paper, we introduce a geometric structure called top, which is a trivialized bundle of plane pencils over a Riemannian 3-manifold, defined as the set of kernels of a circle of 1-forms (e.g. of contact and integrable forms) with…
We describe explicit horizontal open books on some Seifert fibered 3--manifolds. We show that the contact structures compatible with these horizontal open books are Stein fillable and horizontal as well. Moreover we draw surgery diagrams…
A combinatorial presentation of closed orientable 3-manifolds as bi-tricolored links is given together with two versions of a calculus via moves to manipulate bi-tricolored links without changing the represented manifold. That is, we…
A taut contact sphere on a 3-manifold is a linear 2-sphere of contact forms, all defining the same volume form. In the present paper we completely determine the moduli of taut contact spheres on compact left-quotients of SU(2) (the only…
We show that standard cyclic actions on Brieskorn homology 3-spheres with non-empty fixed set do not extend smoothly to any contractible smooth 4-manifold it may bound. The quotient of any such extension would be an acyclic $4$-manifold…
Cylindrical contact homology is a comparatively simple incarnation of symplectic field theory whose existence and invariance under suitable hypotheses was recently established by Hutchings and Nelson. We study this invariant for a general…
We construct branched double coverings by certain direct products of manifolds for connected sums of copies of sphere bundles over the 2-sphere. As an application we answer a question of Kotschick and Loeh up to dimension five. More…
In this paper, we introduce the notions of an iterated planar Lefschetz fibration and an iterated planar open book decomposition and prove the Weinstein conjecture for contact manifolds supporting an open book that has iterated planar…
We discuss 3-manifolds which are cyclic coverings of the 3-sphere, branched over 2-bridge knots and links. Different descriptions of these manifolds are presented: polyhedral, Heegaard diagram, Dehn surgery and coloured graph constructions.…
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 give simple characterizations of contact 1-forms in terms of Dirac structures. We also relate normal almost contact structures to the theory of Dirac structures.