English

Engel structures and weakly hyperbolic flows on four-manifolds

Dynamical Systems 2019-10-09 v2 Geometric Topology Symplectic Geometry

Abstract

We study pairs of Engel structures on four-manifolds whose intersection has constant rank one and which define the same even contact structure, but induce different orientations on it. We establish a correspondence between such pairs of Engel structures and a class of weakly hyperbolic flows. This correspondence is analogous to the correspondence between bi-contact structures and projectively or conformally Anosov flows on three-manifolds found by Eliashberg--Thurston and by Mitsumatsu.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1610.04001,
  title  = {Engel structures and weakly hyperbolic flows on four-manifolds},
  author = {D. Kotschick and T. Vogel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.04001},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

only small changes, now 14 pages, one figure; final version, to appear in Comment. Math. Helv

R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:19:35.812Z