arXiv research

Graphs describe contact surgery on 3-manifolds.

Contact round surgery of contact 3-manifolds is introduced in this paper. By using this method, an alternative proof of the existence of a contact structure on any closed orientable 3-manifold is given. It is also proved that any contact structure on any closed orientable 3-manifold is constructed from the standard con…

Proves existence of strongly overtwisted contact structures on 3-manifolds.

New contactomorphisms found via Dehn twists on 3-manifold sums.

It is well-known that Heegaard genus is additive under connected sum of 3-manifolds. We show that Heegaard genus of contact 3-manifolds is not necessarily additive under contact connected sum. We also prove some basic properties of the contact genus (a.k.a. open book genus) of 3-manifolds, and compute this invariant fo…

Study tight contact structures on specific 3-manifolds.

The study finds algebraically overtwisted tight 3-manifolds via contact surgeries.

Every real 3-manifold can be turned into a real contact structure.

Study Stein fillings of planar contact 3-manifolds with relative trisection genus 2.

Monopole invariant studies contact structures on 3-manifolds.

Study contact 3-manifolds using sub-Riemannian geometry, proving new properties of their Lipschitz homotopy groups.

In this paper we prove a vanishing theorem for the contact Ozsvath--Szabo invariants of certain contact 3--manifolds having positive Giroux torsion. We use this result to establish similar vanishing results for contact structures with underlying 3--manifolds admitting either a torus fibration over the circle or a Seife…

Whether every hyperbolic 3-manifold admits a tight contact structure or not is an open question. Many hyperbolic 3-manifolds contain taut foliations and taut foliations can be perturbed to tight contact structures. The first examples of hyperbolic 3-manifolds without taut foliations were constructed by Roberts, Sharesh…

We show that an oriented elliptic 3-manifold admits a universally tight positive contact structure iff the corresponding group of deck transformations on $S^3$ preserves a standard contact structure pointwise. We also relate univerally tight contact structures on 3-manifolds covered by $S^3$ to the exceptional isomorph…

We prove a neighbourhood theorem for arbitrary knots in contact 3-manifolds. As an application we show that two topologically isotopic Legendrian knots in a contact 3-manifold become Legendrian isotopic after suitable stabilisations.

In this paper, we explore minimal contact triangulations on contact 3-manifolds. We give many explicit examples of contact triangulations that are close to minimal ones. The main results of this article say that on any closed oriented 3-manifold the number of vertices for minimal contact triangulations for overtwisted …

In this note, we classify Stein fillings of an infinite family of contact 3-manifolds up to diffeomorphism. Some contact 3-manifolds in this family can be obtained by Legendrian surgeries on $(S^3,ξ_{std})$ along certain Legendrian 2-bridge knots. We also classify Stein fillings, up to symplectic deformation, of an inf…

A transverse knot exists in S^3 that covers all contact 3-manifolds.

This paper is devoted to the study of curvature and torsion of almost contact curves in trans-Sasakian 3-Manifolds. The conditions for the frenet curves to be almost contact curves in trans-Sasakian 3-manifolds have been obtained.

Classifies convex disks with Legendrian boundary in overtwisted contact 3-manifolds.

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

Infinitely many 3D shapes have multiple ways to be filled with special surfaces.

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 one manifold about another using contact geometry.

We give a proof of, for the case of contact structures defined by global contact 1-forms, a Theorem stated by Eliashberg that for any overtwisted contact structure on a closed 3-manifold, its contact homology is 0. A different proof is also outlined in the appendix by Yakov Eliashberg.

New examples show contact invariants can be non-zero even with half Giroux torsion.

Local normal forms for symmetrical contact structures on 3-manifolds.

In this note we observe that one can contact embed all contact 3-manifolds into a Stein fillable contact structure on the twisted $S^3$-bundle over $S^2$ and also into a unique overtwisted contact structure on $S^3\times S^2$. These results are proven using "spun embeddings" and Lefschetz fibrations.

In two previous papers, the two first-named authors introduced a notion of contact r-surgery along Legendrian knots in contact 3-manifolds. They also showed how (at least in principle) to convert any contact r-surgery into a sequence of contact plus or minus 1 surgeries, and used this to prove that any (closed) contact…

Defines contact surgery distance and shows it's bounded by topological surgery distance by 5.

Contact round surgeries on $(\mathbb{S}^3,ξ_{st})$ help in constructing and understanding contact 3-manifolds.

The paper explores nonexistence and existence of symplectic and Stein fillable contact structures on 3-manifolds.

We show that sutured embedded contact homology is a natural invariant of sutured contact 3-manifolds which can potentially detect some of the topology of the space of contact structures on a 3-manifold with boundary. The appendix, by C. H. Taubes, proves a compactness result for the completion of a sutured contact 3-ma…

We propose in this paper a method for studying contact structures in 3-manifolds by means of branched surfaces. We explain what it means for a contact structure to be carried by a branched surface embedded in a 3-manifold. To make the transition from contact structures to branched surfaces, we first define auxiliary ob…

A flow-spine of a 3-manifold is a spine admitting a flow that is transverse to the spine, where the flow in the complement of the spine is diffeomorphic to a constant flow in an open ball. We say that a contact structure on a closed, connected, oriented 3-manifold is supported by a flow-spine if it has a contact form w…

Given a closed contact 3-manifold with a compatible Riemannian metric, we show that if the sectional curvature is 1/4-pinched, then the contact structure is universally tight. This result improves the Contact Sphere Theorem in [EKM12], where a 4/9-pinching constant was imposed. Some tightness results on positively curv…

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.

The paper defines and studies contact surgery numbers for contact 3-manifolds.

The paper classifies contact 3-manifolds with critical metrics and connects entropy to optimization.

In this survey article we describe different ways of embedding fillings of contact 3-manifolds into closed symplectic 4-manifolds.

In this paper, we find infinite hyperbolic 3-manifolds that admit no weakly symplectically fillable contact structures, using tools in Heegaard Floer theory. We also remark that part of these manifolds do admit tight contact structures.

Contact connected sums do not increase support genus.

We propose the study of some kind of monopole equations directly associated with a contact structure. Through a rudimentary analysis about the solutions, we show that a closed contact 3-manifold with positive Tanaka-Webster curvature and vanishing torsion must be either not symplectically semifillable or having torsion…

We disprove the generalized Chern-Hamilton conjecture on the existence of critical compatible metrics on contact $3$-manifolds. More precisely, we show that a contact $3$-manifold $(M,α)$ admits a critical compatible metric for the Chern-Hamilton energy functional if and only if it is Sasakian or its associated Reeb fl…

We prove that every closed, connected contact 3-manifold can be obtained from the 3-sphere with its standard contact structure by contact surgery of coefficient plus or minus 1 along a Legendrian link. As a corollary, we derive a result of Etnyre and Honda about symplectic cobordisms (in slightly stronger form).

Geodesic vector fields on flat 3-manifolds are related to contact structures.

The study shows examples of contact 3-manifold binding sums that fail to preserve certain properties.

Introduces a new CR invariant for co-oriented contact structures on closed 3-manifolds

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 convex surface theory and classifications of tight contact structures on certain 3-m…