Related papers: Contact structures and periodic fundamental groups

In this paper the 5-dimensional contact SO(3)-manifolds are classified up to equivariant contactomorphisms. The construction of such manifolds with singular orbits requires the use of generalized Dehn twists. We show as an application that…

We consider contact structures on simply-connected 5-manifolds which arise as circle bundles over simply-connected symplectic 4-manifolds and show that invariants from contact homology are related to the divisibility of the canonical class…

We classify compact manifolds of dimension three equipped with a path structure and a fixed contact form (which we refer to as a strict path structure) under the hypothesis that their automorphism group is non-compact. We use a Cartan…

We prove the existence of exotic but homotopically trivial contact structures on spheres of dimension 8k-1. Together with previous results of Eliashberg and the second author this establishes the existence of such structures on all…

We show that the fundamental group of the space of contact structures on the 3-torus (based at the standard contact structure) is isomorphic to the integers.

We use differential forms on loop spaces to prove that the fundamental group of certain geometric transformation groups is infinite. Examples include both finite and infinite dimensional Lie groups. The finite dimensional examples are the…

Bourgeois proved in [5] that odd-dimensional tori admit a contact structure. We shall prove a more general result: Any odd-dimensional parallelisable closed manifold admits a contact structure. This implies that a solvmanifold $\Gamma…

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…

According to Giroux, contact manifolds can be described as open books whose pages are Stein manifolds. For 5-dimensional contact manifolds the pages are Stein surfaces, which permit a description via Kirby diagrams. We introduce handle…

We demonstrate that the functorial properties of the symplectic field theory under strong cobordisms and surgery cobordisms can produce finite algebraic (planar) torsions from simple examples, which gives a unified treatment of most of the…

We extend the hierarchy functors of [33] to the case of strong symplectic cobordisms, via deformations with Maurer--Cartan elements. In particular, we prove that the concave boundary of a strong cobordism has finite algebraic planar torsion…

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 prove, for a class of contact manifolds, that the universal cover of the group of contact diffeomorphisms carries a natural partial order. It leads to a new viewpoint on geometry and dynamics of contactomorphisms. It gives rise to…

We show the existence of elements of infinite order in some homotopy groups of the contactomorphism group of overtwisted spheres. It follows in particular that the contactomorphism group of some high dimensional overtwisted spheres is not…

We classify closed, topological spin$^+$ 4-manifolds with fundamental group $\pi$ of cohomological dimension $\leq 3$ (up to s-cobordism), after stabilization by connected sum with at most $b_3(\pi)$ copies of $S^2\times S^2$. In general we…

The contact invariant is an element in the monopole Floer homology groups of an oriented closed three manifold canonically associated to a given contact structure. A non-vanishing contact invariant implies that the original contact…

Let $M$ be a simply connected spin manifold of dimension at least six which admits a metric of positive scalar curvature. We show that the observer moduli space of positive scalar curvature metrics on $M$ has non-trivial higher homotopy…

We define \emph{$0$-shifted} and \emph{$+1$-shifted contact structures} on differentiable stacks, thus laying the foundations of \emph{shifted Contact Geometry}. As a side result we show that the kernel of a multiplicative $1$-form on a Lie…

We prove that many spaces of positive scalar curvature metrics have the homotopy type of infinite loop spaces. Our result in particular applies to the path component of the round metric inside $\mathcal{R}^+ (S^d)$ if $d \geq 6$. To achieve…

For each nonnegative integer m we show that any closed, oriented topological four-manifold with fundamental group Z_{4m+2} and odd intersection form, with possibly seven exceptions, either admits no smooth structure or admits infinitely…