arXiv research

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

New invariant connects symplectic fillings and contact structures.

Using contact homology, we reobtain some recent results of Geiges and Gonzalo about the fundamental group of the space of contact structures on some 3-manifolds. We show that our techniques can be used to study higher dimensional contact manifolds and higher order homotopy groups.

We use the generalized Pontryagin-Thom construction to analyze the effect of attaching a bypass on the homotopy class of the contact structure. In particular, given a 3-dimensional contact manifold with convex boundary, we show that the bypass triangle attachment changes the homotopy class of the contact structure rela…

We compute the first and second homotopy groups of a class of contact toric manifolds in terms of the images of the associated moment map.

New flow category for contact manifolds from Reeb orbits.

This paper provides a topological method for filling contact structures on the connected sums of $S^2\times S^3$. Examples of nonsymplectomorphic strong fillings of homotopy equivalent contact structures with vanishing first Chern class on $\#_k S^2\times S^3$ $(k\geq2)$ are produced.

We prove that every homotopy class of almost contact structures on a closed 5-dimensional manifold admits a contact structure.

Simple construction of Rumin algebra for contact manifolds.

This thesis extends contact structures to differentiable stacks using line bundle-valued 1-forms.

Computes homotopy types of embedding spaces in tight contact 3-manifolds.

New contact structures detected by contact homology.

Study the spaces of Legendrian knots and links with maximal Thurston-Bennequin invariant.

Characterizes Anosov flows via contact geometry.

We give a complete classification of foliations on open contact manifolds whose leaves are contact submanifolds of the ambient manifold. The results are analogues of Haefliger's classification of foliations on open manifold.

A contact foliation is a foliation endowed with a leafwise contact structure. In this remark we explain a turbulisation procedure that allows us to prove that tightness is not a homotopy invariant property for contact foliations.

On every compact and orientable three-manifold, we construct total foliations (three codimension 1 foliations that are transverse at every point). This construction can be performed on any homotopy class of plane fields with vanishing Euler class. As a corollary we obtain similar results on bi-contact structures.

For a closed oriented 3-manifold Y, we define an absolute grading on the Heegaard Floer homology groups of Y by homotopy classes of oriented 2-plane fields. We show that this absolute grading refines the relative one and that it is compatible with the maps induced by cobordisms. We also prove that if ξ is a contact str…

Two constructions of contact manifolds are presented: (i) products of S^1 with manifolds admitting a suitable decomposition into two exact symplectic pieces and (ii) fibre connected sums along isotropic circles. Baykur has found a decomposition as required for (i) for all closed, oriented 4-manifolds. As a corollary, w…

We establish a parametric extension $h$-principle for overtwisted contact structures on manifolds of all dimensions, which is the direct generalization of the $3$-dimensional result from \cite{Eli89}. It implies, in particular, that any closed manifold admits a contact structure in any given homotopy class of almost co…

The aim of this paper is to give an alternative proof of a theorem about the existence of contact structures on five-manifolds due to Geiges. This theorem asserts that simply-connected five-manifolds admit a contact structure in every homotopy class of almost contact structures. Our proof uses the open book constructio…

Study shows how to section map between holonomic and formal solutions.

We present a sketch of the proof of the following theorems: (1) Every 3-manifold has only finitely many homotopy classes of 2-plane fields which carry tight contact structures. (2) Every closed atoroidal 3-manifold carries finitely many isotopy classes of tight contact structures.

For any integer $n\geq 2$, we construct an infinite family of Stein fillable contact $(4n-1)$-manifolds each of which admits infinitely many pairwise homotopy inequivalent Stein fillings.

Let V be a closed 3-manifold. In this paper we prove that the homotopy classes of plane fields on V that contain tight contact structures are in finite number and that, if V is atoroidal, the isotopy classes of tight contact structures are also in finite number.

The Whitney-Graustein theorem states that regular closed curves in the 2-plane are classified, up to regular homotopy, by their rotation number. Here we give a simple proof based on contact geometry.

We make some elementary observations concerning subcritically Stein fillable contact structures on 5-manifolds. Specifically, we determine the diffeomorphism type of such contact manifolds in the case the fundamental group is finite cyclic, and we show that on the 5-sphere the standard contact structure is the unique s…

To each oriented surface S, we associate a differential graded category Ko(S). The homotopy category Ho(Ko(S)) is a triangulated category which satisfies properties akin to those of the contact categories studied by K. Honda. These categories are also related to the algebraic contact categories of Y. Tian and to the bo…

The first two authors showed in~\cite{AM1} how the Conley-Zehnder index of any contractible periodic Reeb orbit of a non-degenerate toric contact form on a good toric contact manifold with zero first Chern class, i.e. a Gorenstein toric contact manifold, can be explicitly computed using moment map data. In this paper w…

In this paper we show that any good toric contact manifold has well defined cylindrical contact homology and describe how it can be combinatorially computed from the associated moment cone. As an application we compute the cylindrical contact homology of a particularly nice family of examples that appear in the work of…

The study finds many tight contact structures on hyperbolic 3-spheres.

A rigorous foundation for the contact homology of Legendrian submanifolds in a contact manifold of the form $P\times \R$ where $P$ is an exact symplectic manifold is established. The class of such contact manifolds include 1-jet spaces of smooth manifolds. As an application, contact homology is used to provide (smooth)…

We classify the normal CR structures on $S^3$ and their automorphism groups. Together with [3], this closes the classification of normal CR structures on contact 3-manifolds. We give a criterion to compare 2 normal CR structures, and we show that the underlying contact structure is, up to homotopy, unique.

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

Twists of contact structures in dimension 3 and higher are studied in this paper from a viewpoint of contact round surgery. Three kinds of new modifications of contact structures which are higher-dimensional generalizations of the $3$-dimensional Lutz twists are introduced. One of the operations makes a contact manifol…

We give a bordism-theoretic characterisation of those closed almost contact (2q+1)-manifolds (with q > 2) which admit a Stein fillable contact structure. Our method is to apply Eliashberg's h-principle for Stein manifolds in the setting of Kreck's modified surgery. As an application, we show that any simply connected a…

Given a manifold $M$ and a proper sub-bundle $Δ\subset TM$, we study homotopy properties of the horizontal base-point free loop space $Λ$, i.e. the space of absolutely continuous maps $γ:S^1\to M$ whose velocities are constrained to $Δ$ (for example: legendrian knots in a contact manifold). A key technical ingredient f…

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…

We discuss the Sasakian geometry of odd dimensional homotopy spheres. In particular, we give a completely new proof of the existence of metrics of positive Ricci curvature on exotic spheres that can be realized as the boundary of a parallelizable manifold. Furthermore, it is shown that on such homotopy spheres $\script…

We construct a compact simply-connected 7-dimensional manifold admitting a K-contact structure but not a Sasakian structure. We also study rational homotopy properties of such manifolds, proving in particular that a simply-connected 7-dimensional Sasakian manifold has vanishing cup-product on the second cohomology and …

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 of a foliation can contain non-diffeomorphic contact structures. In this paper …

In this paper we study a subspace of the space of Legendrian loops and we show that the injection of this space into the full loop space is an S1-equivariant homotopy equivalence. This space can be also seen as the space of zero Maslov index Legendrian loops and it shows up as a suitable space of variations in contact …

Given a closed oriented 3-manifold M, we establish an isomorphism between the Heegaard Floer homology group HF^+(-M) and the embedded contact homology group ECH(M). Starting from an open book decomposition (S,h) of M, we construct a chain map Φ^+ from a Heegaard Floer chain complex associated to (S,h) to an embedded co…

We show that any co-orientable foliation of dimension two on a closed orientable $3$-manifold with continuous tangent plane field can be $C^0$-approximated by both positive and negative contact structures unless all the leaves are simply connected. As applications we deduce that the existence of a taut $C^0$-foliation …

In this paper we study the groups of contactomorphisms of a closed contact manifold from a topological viewpoint. First we construct examples of contact forms on spheres whose Reeb flow has a dense orbit. Then we show that the unitary group U(n+1) is homotopically essential in the group of contactomorphisms of the stan…

We introduce and analyze the characteristic foliation induced by a contact structure on a branched surface, in particular a branched standard spine of a 3-manifold. We extend to (fairly general) singular foliations of branched surfaces the local existence and uniqueness results which hold for genuine surfaces. Moreover…

Let $M$ be a connected open Riemann surface. We prove that the space $\mathscr L(M,\mathbb C^{2n+1})$ of all holomorphic Legendrian immersions of $M$ into $\mathbb C^{2n+1}$, $n\geq 1$, endowed with the standard holomorphic contact structure, is weakly homotopy equivalent to the space $\mathscr C(M,\mathbb S^{4n-1})$ o…

In relation to the 4-dimensional smooth Poincaré conjecture we construct a tentative invariant of homotopy 4-spheres using embedded contact homology (ECH) and Seiberg-Witten theory (SWF). But for good reason it is a constant value independent of the sphere, so this null-result demonstrates that one should not try to us…