Related papers: Branched Spines and Contact Structures on 3-manifo…
For a given branched covering between closed connected surfaces, there are several easy relations one can establish between the Euler characteristics of the surfaces, their orientability, the total degree, and the local degrees at the…
Given a surface $S$ in a 3D contact sub-Riemannian manifold $M$, we investigate the metric structure induced on $S$ by $M$, in the sense of length spaces. First, we define a coefficient $\widehat K$ at characteristic points that determines…
A $b$-contact structure on a $b$-manifold $(M,Z)$ is a Jacobi structure on $M$ satisfying a transversality condition along the hypersurface $Z$. We show that, in three dimensions, $b$-contact structures with overtwisted three-dimensional…
A real 3-manifold is a smooth 3-manifold together with an orientation preserving smooth involution, which is called a real structure. A real contact 3-manifold is a real 3-manifold with a contact distribution that is antisymmetric with…
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…
This paper presents two existence h-principles, the first for conformal symplectic structures on closed manifolds, and the second for leafwise conformal symplectic structures on foliated manifolds with non empty boundary. The latter…
We define a laminar branched surface to be a branched surface satisfying the following conditions: (1) Its horizontal boundary is incompressible; (2) there is no monogon; (3) there is no Reeb component; (4) there is no sink disk (after…
We construct a simple topological invariant of certain 3-manifolds, including quotients of the 3-sphere by finite groups, based on the fact that the tangent bundle of an orientable 3-manifold is trivialisable. This invariant is strong…
Branched covers are applied frequently in topology - most prominently in the construction of closed oriented PL d-manifolds. In particular, strong bounds for the number of sheets and the topology of the branching set are known for dimension…
In this paper we study embeddings of contact manifolds using braidings of one manifold about another. In particular we show how to embed many contact 3-manifolds into the standard contact 5-sphere. We also show how to obstruct braidings of…
According to a theorem of Eliashberg and Thurston a $C^2$-foliation on a closed 3-manifold can be $C^0$-approximated by contact structures unless all leaves of the foliation are spheres. Examples on the 3-torus show that every neighbourhood…
A foliation on a manifold M can be informally thought of as a partition of M into injectively immersed submanifolds, called leaves. In this thesis we study foliations whose leaves carry some specific geometric structures. The thesis…
Given a sequence of properly embedded minimal surfaces in a $3$-manifold with local bounds on area and genus, we prove subsequential convergence, smooth away from a discrete set, to a smooth embedded limit surface, possibly with…
Using the structural theorems developed in [Hua13], we study the deformation theory of coisotropic submanifolds in contact manifolds, under the assumption that the characteristic foliation is nonsingular. In the "middle" dimensions, we find…
Techniques for constructing codimension 2 embeddings and immersions of the 2 and 3-fold branched covers of the 3 and 4-dimensional spheres are presented. These covers are in braided form, and it is in this sense that they are folded. More…
This paper is the first part in a 2 part study of an elementary functorial construction from the category of finite non-abelian groups to a category of singular compact, oriented 2-manifolds. After a desingularization process this…
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 describe several methods to construct minimal foliations by hyperbolic surfaces on closed 3-manifolds, and discuss the properties of the examples thus obtained.
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…
We apply the local removable singularity theorem for minimal laminations and the local picture theorem on the scale of topology to obtain two descriptive results for certain possibly singular minimal laminations of $\mathbb{R}^3$. These two…