Related papers: Tight contact structures on some small Seifert fib…

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 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 paper, we study contact structures on any open 3-manifold V which is the interior of a compact 3-manifold. To do this, we introduce proper contact isotopy invariants called the slope at infinity and the division number at infinity.…

In this note, we exhibit infinite families of tight non-fillable contact manifolds supported by planar open books with vanishing Heegaard Floer contact invariants. Moreover, we also exhibit an infinite such family where the supported…

Seiberg-Witten (Floer) theory, Ozsvath-Szabo's Heegaard Floer theory, Hutchings's embedded contact homology, in different stages of development, define (or are expected to define) packages of invariants for 3- and 4-manifolds (including…

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…

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…

We exhibit a 3-manifold which admits no tight contact structure.

In this article, we prove a generalization of a theorem of Lisca-Matic to Stein cobordisms and develop a method for distinguishing certain Stein cobordisms using rotation numbers. Using these results along with standard techniques from…

We take a first step towards understanding the relationship between foliations and universally tight contact structures on hyperbolic 3-manifolds. If a surface bundle over a circle has pseudo-Anosov holonomy, we obtain a classification of…

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…

We characterize the oriented Seifert-fibered three-manifolds which admit positive, transverse contact structures.

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…

Suppose that S is a surface with boundary and that g and h are diffeomorphisms of S which restrict to the identity on the boundary. Let Y_g, Y_h, and Y_{hg} be the three-manifolds with open book decompositions given by (S,g), (S,h), and…

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 use the Ozsvath-Szabo contact invariant to produce examples of strongly symplectically fillable contact 3-manifolds which are not Stein fillable.

We establish a criterion that ensures a bounded almost complex curve in a bounded almost complex 4-manifold minimizes genus amongst all smooth surfaces that share its homology class and the transverse link on its boundary. An immediate…

Ozsvath-Szabo contact invariants are a powerful way to prove tightness of contact structures but they are known to vanish in the presence of Giroux torsion. In this paper we construct, on infinitely many manifolds, infinitely many isotopy…

In this article we conjecture a 4-dimensional characterization of tightness: a contact structure is tight if and only if a slice-Bennequin inequality holds for smoothly embedded surfaces in Yx[0,1]. An affirmative answer to our conjecture…

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…