Related papers: Every contact manifold can be given a non-fillable…

By a construction of Berstein and Edmonds every proper branched cover f between manifolds is a factor of a branched covering orbit map from a locally connected and locally compact Hausdorff space called the monodromy space of f to the…

Let X be a 4-manifold with contact boundary. We prove that the monopole invariants of X introduced by Kronheimer and Mrowka vanish under the following assumptions: (i) a connected component of the boundary of X carries a metric with…

The aim of this paper is to address the following question: given a contact manifold $(\Sigma, \xi)$, what can be said about the aspherical symplectic manifolds $(W, \omega)$ bounded by $(\Sigma, \xi)$ ? We first extend a theorem of…

We construct a contact 5-manifold supported by infinitely many distinct open books with the identity monodromy and pairwise exotic Stein pages (i.e. pages are pairwise homeomorphic but non-diffeomorphic Stein fillings of a fixed contact…

In this note we observe, answering a question of Eliashberg and Thurston, that all contact structures on a closed oriented 3-manifold are $C^\infty$-deformations of foliations.

Let (m,b) a pair of natural numbers. For m even (resp. m odd and b greater than or equal to 2) we show that if there is an m-dimensional non-formal compact oriented manifold whose first Betti number equals b, there is also a symplectic…

We show that on any closed contact manifold of dimension greater than 1 a contact structure with vanishing contact homology can be constructed. The basic idea for the construction comes from Giroux. We use a special open book decomposition…

We prove that every nondegenerate contact form on a closed connected three-manifold, such that the associated contact structure has torsion first Chern class, has either two or infinitely many simple Reeb orbits. By previous results it…

We construct examples of non-formal simply connected and compact oriented manifolds of any dimension bigger or equal to 7.

We give necessary and sufficient conditions for a closed orientable 9-manifold M to admit an almost contact structure. The conditions are stated in terms of the Stiefel-Whitney classes of M and other more subtle homotopy invariants of M. By…

Extending work of Chen, we prove the Weinstein conjecture in dimension three for strongly fillable contact structures with either non-vanishing first Chern class or with strong and exact filling having non-trivial canonical bundle. This…

These notes are based on a course that took place at the Universit\'e de Nantes in June 2011 during the "Trimester on Contact and Symplectic Topology". We will explain how holomorphic curves can be used to study symplectic fillings of a…

If a contact form on a (2n+1)-dimensional closed contact manifold admits closed Reeb orbits, then its systolic ration is defined to be the quotient of (n+1)th power of the shortest period of Reeb orbits by the contact volume. We prove that…

We derive new existence results for tight contact structures on certain 3-manifolds which can be presented as surgery along specific knots in S^3. Indeed, we extend our earlier results on knots with maximal Thurston-Bennequin number being…

We give examples of tight high dimensional contact manifolds admitting a contactomorphism whose powers are all smoothly isotopic but not contact-isotopic to the identity. This is a generalization of an observation in dimension 3 by Gompf,…

In this paper, we show the existence of (co-oriented) contact structures on certain classes of $G_2$-manifolds, and that these two structures are compatible in certain ways. Moreover, we prove that any seven-manifold with a spin structure…

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.

A prism is the product space $\Delta \times I$ where $\Delta$ is a 2-simplex and $I$ is a closed interval. As an analogue of simplicial complexes, we introduce prism complexes and show that every compact $3$-manifold has a prism complex…

The question of whether a Sasakian metric can admit an additional compatible (K-)contact structure is addressed. In the complete case if the second structure is also assumed Sasakian, works of Tachibana-Yu and Tanno show that the manifold…

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…